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McCLELLAN'S 

LAST SERVICE TO 

THE REPUBLIC, 



TOGETHER WITH 

A TRIBUTE TO HIS MEMORY, 



BY 



GEORGE TICKNOR CURTIS. 




NEW YORK : 
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, 

I, 3, AND 5 BOND STREET. 
1886. 



\- 






Copyright, 1885, 
By GEORGE TICKNOR CURTIS. 



/ 



PREFATORY NOTE. 



Three of the papers in this volume were orig- 
inally published in the " North American Review," 
for April, May, and June, 1880. They are now 
repubhshed by permission of the editor and pro- 
prietor of that magazine. The fourth paper is a 
tribute to the memory of the late General McClel- 
lan, which was first published in " The Star," at 
New York, November 18, 1885. A few notes are 
added to this edition, distinguished, as to the time 
of their being written, by inclosure in brackets. 
The entire contents of this volume are under the 
protection of copyright. 

Every statement of a fact, contained in these 
pages, which was not founded on General McClel- 
lan's official report of his campaigns, or derived 
from some other public source, was given to me 
orally by the General in the spring of 1880, and 



4 PREFATORY NOTE. 

was written down by me at the time. At my 
request, he superintended the preparation of the 
map which shows his position and that of the 
Confederate troops on the 7th and 8th of Novem- 
ber, 1862, and compared it with the military maps 
issued by the Government after the close of the 
civil war. — General McClellan died at his home in 
Orange, N. J., on the 29th of October, 1885. 

G. T. C. 

Washington, D. C, December i, 1883. 



MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 
TO THE REPUBLIC. 



PART I. 

A FULL history of General McClellan's services 
to the country, from the time when he led the 
Army of the Potomac to a position of safety on 
the James River at Harrison's Landing, to the 
transfer of that army to General Pope's command, 
and thence to the battle of Antietam, has never 
been written. In that part of McClellan's official 
report which covers this period, there is hardly 
more than a skeleton of events, made up of dis- 
patches and letters, connected by a thread of nar- 
rative, in which the personal interviews, the oral 
communications, the anecdotes, and the acts of in- 
dividuals, are for the most part wanting". That 
singularly dramatic scene, which witnessed the 
withdrawal of McClellan's army from the James, 
the defeat and disorderly retreat of Pope, McClel- 



6 MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 

lan's resumption of the command at the sudden and 
unexpected request of President Lincoln, his resto- 
ration of order, his provisions for the safety of 
Washington, his march into northern Maryland, 
his repulse of Lee, his advance into Virginia, and 
his recall at the moment when his preparations 
had been so made that nothing could probably 
have stayed his entrance into Richmond, is now 
to be described. Of the four principal actors 
in this remarkable drama, Lincoln, Stanton, Hal- 
leck, and McClellan, the last alone survives.* In 
what we shall say of the conduct of each of the 
three others toward the general who saved the 
capital, we may present to our readers unexpect- 
ed explanations of many things which they have 
been accustomed to view differently, or which 
have remained hitherto in obscurity. They will 
understand, however, that we do not speak at 
random, and that we do not ask for their belief 
without having had ample means for forming our 
own. 

The present narrative will commence at the 
point of time when General McClellan delivered 
personally into the hands of President Lincoln a 
letter on the general subject of the war, which has 
long been public, and which has been the subject 

* Written and first published in April, 1880. General McClellan 
died suddenly, October 29, 1885. 



TO THE REPUBLIC. y 

of much criticism. The true history of that letter 
we are able to give. While General McClellan 
was encamped on the Chickahominy, in June, 1862, 
awaiting- the re-enforcements which he so much 
needed for his advance on Richmond, he said in a 
telegraphic dispatch to the President, relating to 
other matters, " I would be glad to lay before your 
Excellency, by letter or telegraph, my views as to 
the present state of military affairs throughout the 
whole country." The President answered on the 
next day, as follows : " If it would not divert too 
much of your time and attention from the army 
under your immediate command, I would be glad 
to have your views as to the present state of mili- 
tary affairs throughout the country, as you say you 
would be glad to give them. I would rather it 
should be by letter than by telegraph, because of 
the better chance of secrecy." To this General 
McClellan replied that under the circumstances he 
would defer for the present the communication he 
desired to make. It was, however, only deferred. 
General McClellan felt that what he desired to say 
to the President was too important to be forborne, 
but he postponed the preparation of his letter until 
a more convenient time. 

On the 25th of June (1862), McClellan, closely 
pressed by the enemy, whose force amounted, ac- 
cording to his best information, to two hundred 



8 MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 

thousand men, telegraphed to Stanton, the Secre- 
tary of War, as follows : 

Headquarters, Army of the Potomac, 

Camp Lincoln, Jane 25, 1862 — 6.15 p. m. 

I have just returned from the field, and found your 
dispatch in regard to Jackson. 

Several contrabands, just in, give information confirm- 
ing supposition that Jackson's advance is at or near Han- 
over Court-House, and that Beauregard arrived, with 
strong re-enforcements, in Richmond yesterday. 

I incline to think that Jackson will attack my right and 
rear. The rebel force is stated at (200,000) two hundred 
thousand, including Jackson and Beauregard. I shall 
have to contend against vastly superior odds if these re- 
ports be true. But this army will do all in the power of 
men to hold their position and repulse any attack. 

I regret my great inferiority in numbers, but feel that 
I am in no way responsible for it, as I have not failed to 
represent, repeatedly, the necessity of re-enforcements ; 
that this was the decisive point, and that all the available 
means of the Government should be concentrated here. 
I will do all that a general can do, with the splendid army 
I have the honor to command, and, if it is destroyed by 
overwhelming numbers, can at least die with it, and share 
its fate. 

But, if the result of the action which will probably 
occur to-morrow, or within a short time, is a disaster, the 
responsibility can not be thrown on my shoulders ; it must 
rest where it belongs. 



TO THE REPUBLIC. g 

Since I commenced this, I have received additional 
intelHgence, confirming the supposition in regard to Jack- 
son's movements and Beauregard's arrival. I shall proba- 
bly be attacked to-morrow, and now go to the other side 
of the Chickahominy, to arrange for the defense on that 
side. I feel that there is no use in my again asking for 
re-enforcements. 

G. B. McClellan, Major- General. 
Edwin M. Stanton, Secretary of War. 

On the 26th, the day upon which McClellan had 
fixed for his final advance, although the re-enforce- 
ments which he had so earnestly and repeatedly 
called for had been withheld from him, he was 
attacked by the enemy in strong force on his right. 
He was thus compelled to turn his attention to the 
protection of his communications and depots of 
supply. '' This," he says in his report, " was a bit- 
ter confirmation of the military judgment which had 
been reiterated to my military superiors from the 
inception and through the progress of the Pen- 
insular campaign." Then followed The Seven 
Days, through which he fought his way for a 
change of base to the James River, in a series of 
desperate coniiicts, in every one of which the Con- 
federates were baffled, until, on the night of the 3d 
of July, the last of the wagon-trains reached the 
new base at Harrison's Landing, and the wearied 
Army of the Potomac, which had battled with such 



lO MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 

heroic endurance under his skillful guidance, rested 
in security, protected by their own batteries and 
the gunboats which lay in the river. The three 
following days were occupied by McClellan in 
strengthening and guarding his position, and in a 
fruitless telegraphic correspondence with the Presi- 
dent, to convince the latter that re-enforcements 
ought to be sent to him, so that he could advance 
on Richmond from the James. " To re-enforce you,'* 
said Mr. Lincoln, " so as to enable you to resume 
the offensive within a month, or even six weeks, is 
impossible. . . . Under these circumstances, the 
defensive, for the present, must be your only care. 
Save the army, first, where you are, if you can ; 
and, secondly, by removal, if you must." 

. While the Army of the Potomac was thus rest- 
ing in the defensive at Harrison's Landing, General 
McClellan wrote to the President, on the 7th of 
July, the letter which he had obtained permission 
to w^rite. It is but fair to take his own account of 
the motives which actuated him in making this 
communication to the President. *' While General- 
in-Chief," he said in his report, " and directing the 
operations of all our armies in the field, I had be- 
come deeply impressed with the importance of 
adopting and carrying out certain views regarding 
the conduct of the war, which, in my judgment, 
were essential to its objects and success. During 



TO THE REPUBLIC, II 

an active campaign of three months in the enemy's 
country, these were so fully confirmed that I con- 
ceived it a duty, in the critical position we then 
occupied, not to withhold a candid expression of 
the more important of these views from the Com- 
mander-in-Chief whom the Constitution places at 
the head of the armies and navies, as well as of the 
Government of the nation." This letter, conceived 
in this spirit and privately delivered into the Presi- 
dent's own hands, is the one that has been so long 
misrepresented as a political manifesto of General 
McClellan, intended to promote his personal pros- 
pects for the next Presidency. 

The letter having been completed and signed, 
General McClellan was about to intrust it to the 
hands of General Marcy, his chief of staff, who was 
going to Washington, for delivery to the Presi- 
dent, when intelligence was unexpectedly received 
that the President was coming down to Harrison's 
Landing. He arrived on or about the 8th of July. 
General McClellan went on board the steamer to 
receive the President, and, after they had been to- 
gether a short time in the cabin, McClellan placed 
his letter in the President's hands. Mr. Lincoln 
read it through, folded it up, and, with no comment 
save the two words '' All right," put it in his pocket. 
He remained at Harrison's Landing for forty-eight 
hours, in constant intercourse with McClellan of 



12 MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 

the most confidential nature, and never once alluded 
to this letter with either commendation, criticism, 
censure, or complaint.^ How this letter, never in- 
tended for publication as its context shows, came 
long afterward to be given to the newspaper press 
is not known. It was not done by General Mc- 
Clellan, or by his permission. 

Headquarters, Army of the Potomac, 
Camp near Harrison's Landing, Virginia, July 7, 1862. 

Mr. President : You have been duly informed that 
the rebel army is in our front, with the purpose of over- 
whelming us by attacking our positions, or reducing us by 
blocking our river communications. I can not but regard 
our condition as critical, and I earnestly desire, in view of 
possible contingencies, to lay before your Excellency, for 
your private consideration, my general views concerning 
the existing state of the rebellion, although they do not 
strictly relate to the situation of this army, or strictly 
come within the scope of my official duties. These views 
amount to convictions, and are deeply impressed on my 
mind and heart. Our cause must never be abandoned ; 

* While Mr. Lincoln was on shore at Harrison's Landing, the sol- 
diers exhibited no disposition to cheer him. In fact, the rank and file 
of the army received him very coldly. General McClellan caused the 
men to be told that the President should be cheered ; and then he was 
cheered, but not with the slightest enthusiasm. The men felt too 
deeply that the Government had left them to encounter terrible perils, 
without proper support ; and they also felt that, after all their exertions 
and endurance, they ought to be reinforced and allowed to resume the 
offensive for which they ardently longed. 



TO THE REPUBLIC. 13 

it is the cause of free institutions and self-government. 
The Constitution and the Union must be preserved, what- 
ever may be the cost in time, treasure, and blood. If 
secession is successful, other dissolutions are clearly to be 
seen in the future. Let neither military disaster, political 
faction, nor foreign war shake your settled purpose to en- 
force the equal operation of the laws of the United States 
upon the people of every State. 

The time has come when the Government must deter- 
mine upon a civil and military policy covering the whole 
ground of our national trouble. The responsibility of de- 
termining, declaring, and supporting such civil and mili- 
tary policy, and of directing the whole course of national 
affairs in regard to the rebellion, must now be assumed 
and exercised by you, or our cause will be lost. The 
Constitution gives you power sufficient even for the pres- 
ent terrible exigency. 

This rebellion has assumed the character of a war ; as 
such it should be regarded, and it should be conducted 
upon the highest principles known to Christian civiliza- 
tion. It should not be a war looking to the subjugation 
of the people of any State, in any event. It should not 
be at all a war upon populations, but against armed forces 
and political organizations. Neither confiscation of prop- 
erty, political executions of persons, territorial organiza- 
tion of States, nor forcible abolition of slavery should be 
contemplated for a moment. In prosecuting the war, all 
private property and unarmed persons should be strictly 
protected, subject only to the necessity of military opera- 



H 



MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 



tions. All private property taken for military use should 
be paid or receipted for; pillage and waste should be 
treated as high crimes ; all unnecessary trespass sternly 
prohibited, and offensive demeanor by the miUtary toward 
citizens promptly rebuked. Military arrests should not 
be tolerated, except in places where active hostilities exist, 
and oaths not required by enactments constitutionally 
made should be neither demanded nor received. Military 
government should be confined to the preservation of 
public order and the protection of political rights. Mili- 
tary power should not be allowed to interfere with the re- 
lations of servitude, either by supporting or impairing the 
authority of the master, except for repressing disorder, as 
in other cases. Slaves contraband under the act of Con- 
gress, seeking military protection, should receive it. The 
right of the Government to appropriate permanently to its 
own service claims to slave-labor should be asserted, and 
the right of the owner to compensation therefor should be 
recognized. 

This principle might be extended, upon grounds of 
military necessity and security, to all the slaves within a 
particular State, thus working manumission in such State ; 
and in Missouri, perhaps in Western Virginia also, and 
possibly even in Maryland, the expediency of such a meas- 
ure is only a question of time. 

A system of policy thus constitutional and conserva- 
tive, and pervaded by the influences of Christianity and 
freedom, would receive the support of almost all truly 
loyal men, would deeply impress the rebel masses and all 



TO THE REPUBLIC, 



15 



foreign nations, and it might be humbly hoped that it 
would commend itself to the favor of the Almighty. 

Unless the principles governing the future conduct of 
our struggle shall be made known and approved, the effort 
to obtain requisite forces will be almost hopeless. A dec- 
laration of radical views, especially upon slavery, will rap- 
idly disintegrate our present armies. 

The policy of the Government must be supported by 
concentrations of military power. The national forces 
should not be dispersed in expeditions, posts of occupa- 
tion, and numerous armies, but should be mainly collected 
into masses, and brought to bear upon the armies of the 
Confederate States. Those armies thoroughly defeated, 
the political structure which they support would soon 
cease to exist. 

In carrying out any system of policy which you may 
form, you will require a commander-in-chief of the army 
— one who possesses your confidence, understands your 
views, and who is competent to execute your orders by 
directing the military forces of the nation to the accom- 
plishment of the objects by you proposed. I do not ask 
that place for myself. I am willing to serve you in such 
position as you may assign me, and I will do so as faith- 
fully as ever subordinate served superior. 

I may be on the brink of eternity, and, as I hope for 
forgiveness from my Maker, I have written this letter with 
sincerity toward you, and from love for my country. 

Very respectfully, your obedient servant, 

G. B. McClellan. 
His Excellency, A. Lincoln, President. 



l6 MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 

The President returned to Washington, carry- 
ing with him General McClellan's letter, on or 
about the loth of July, undecided as to the future 
military operations. The dispatches which fol- 
lowed his return are very important. On the 12th 
McClellan telegraphed to him : *' 1 am more and 
more convinced that this army ought not to be 
withdrawn from here, but promptly re-enforced 
and thrown again upon Richmond. If we have 
little more than half a chance, we can take it. I 
dread the effects of any retreat upon the morale of 
my men." Again, on the 17th he telegraphed to 
the President ; " I have consulted fully with Gen- 
eral Burnside, and would commend to your favor- 
able consideration the general's plan for bringing 
seven additional regiments from North CaroHna, 
by leaving Newbern to the care of the gunboats. 
It appears manifestly to be our policy to concen- 
trate here everything we can possibly spare from 
less important points, to make sure of crushing the 
enemy at Richmond, which seems clearly to be the 
most important point in rebeldom. Nothing should 
be left to chance here. I would recommend that 
General Burnside, with all his troops, be ordered 
to this army, to enable it to assume the offensive as 
soon as possible." On the i8th he repeated this 
advice, adding : '' Am anxious to have determina- 
tion of Government, that no time may be lost in 



TO THE REPUBLIC. 



17 



preparing for it. Hours are very precious now, 
and perfect unity of action necessary." 

Ten days passed away, and still no decision had 
been made at Washington. On the 28th McClel- 
lan telegraphed to Halleck, the General-in-Chief : 
*' My opinion is more and more firm that here is 
the defense of Washington, and that I should be 
re-enforced at once by all available troops, to enable 
me to advance. Retreat would be disastrous to the 
army and the cause. I am confident of that." On 
the 30th he again telegraphed to Halleck : '' I hope 
it may soon be decided what is to be done by this 
army ; and that the decision may be to re-enforce 
it at once. We are losing much valuable time, and 
that at a moment when energy and decision are 
sadly needed." 

We must pause here to explain that, at the time 
of this indecision on the part of the Government, 
the question was whether the enemy should be at- 
tacked by McClellan advancing on Richmond, and 
be thereby confined to the defense of his capital, or 
whether he should be allowed to advance on Wash- 
ington by way of Fredericksburg, thus compelling 
the Federal Government to defend their capital. 
As a military question, considering the compara- 
tive advantages of attack and defense, and the dan- 
gers that would follow from a defeat of the Federal 
forces in the front of Washington, there was not 



1 8 MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 

much room for doubt. If McClellan were to be re- 
enforced and ordered to attack Richmond, the 
troops of the Confederates would have to be con- 
centrated for its defense. If McClellan had been 
defeated in this attempt, his defeat must have cost 
the enemy so much that he could hardly have been 
in a condition to seriously menace Washington be- 
fore a sufficient force could have been interposed 
for its defense. McClellan, be it observed, did not 
ask for all the forces that were at the disposal of 
his Government ; he asked for all that were " avail- 
able," which he explained to mean " everything 
that we can possibly spare from less important 
points " — a meaning that the military authorities in 
Washington must have understood. On the other 
hand, if McClellan's army were to be withdrawn 
from the James, the enemy would be practically in- 
vited to advance on Washington ; and, if he should 
defeat the Federal armies gathered in front of that 
capital, it would be in a great peril. A vast deal, 
too, would depend upon the commander who was 
to be intrusted with the defense of Washington, in 
case the Army of the Potomac should be with- 
drawn from the James, thus encouraging the enemy 
to stake his utmost efforts upon a great battle, or a 
series of battles, in front of the Federal capital. 
At the time when this momentous decision was to 
be made by our Government, they contemplated a 



TO THE REPUBLIC. 19 

reliance upon General Pope to encounter General 
Lee ; and to encounter Lee, not after he had been 
crippled by a previous contest with McClellan, but 
in the full strength which would remain to him 
without that contest. It is impossible, therefore, to 
read McClellan's dispatches at this period of the 
President's indecision, without being impressed by 
the conviction that McClellan was right in his 
military judgment, even if we do not look for- 
ward to what actually followed. The elements for 
a sound determination were as patent to the au- 
thorities in Washington, between the loth of July 
and the 6th of August, as they were to McClel- 
lan. But, unfortunately, other counsels prevailed 
over his. 

Between the 30th of July and the 3d of August 
the enemy made some attempts to feel McClellan's 
position, by demonstrations with hght batteries, 
but they were driven back toward Petersburg, and 
Coggin's Point, on the south side of the James, was 
occupied on the same day by McClellan, and forti- 
fied. On that day also he sent forward a force of 
cavalry on the south side of the river, which drove 
back a body of five hundred of the enemy's cavalry 
in confusion. His whole position on the James was 
now therefore secure, and he was in a condition to 
advance, if he could have Burnside, whom he again 
asked for on the 2d of August. '' Give me Burn- 



20 MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 

side," he telegraphed to Halleck, " and I will stir 
these people up." 

On the 30th of July the Government was appar- 
ently still undecided, but, from the tenor of Hal- 
leck's dispatches of that day and the next, McClel- 
lan had some reason to expect orders to advance 
on Richmond. Thus on the 30th Halleck sent two 
dispatches. The first said: ''A dispatch just re- 
ceived from General Pope says that deserters re- 
port that the enemy is moving south of James 
River, and that the force in Richmond is very 
small. I suggest that he be pressed in that direc- 
tion, so as to ascertain the facts of the case." But 
again, on the 30th, Halleck telegraphed, rather am- 
biguously : '' In order to enable you to move in any 
direction, it is necessary to relieve you of your sick. 
The Surgeon-General has therefore been directed 
to make arrangements for them at other places, and 
the Quartermaster-General to provide transporta- 
tion. I hope you will send them away as quickly 
as possible, and advise me of their removal." And, 
on the 31st, Halleck telegraphed, "General Pope 
again telegraphs that the enemy is reported to be 
evacuating Richmond, and falling back on Danville 
and Lynchburg." These were the only data Mc- 
Clellan then had, from which to form an opinion as 
to the intentions of the Government. They had, in 
fact, at this time, no fixed intentions, but the dis- 



TO THE REPUBLIC. 21 

patches looked as if McClellan might be allowed to 
advance. 

On the 4th of August, General Hooker, by Gen- 
eral McClellan's orders, advanced with a large force 
to Malvern Hill, a strong position of the Confeder- 
ates fourteen and three quarter miles distant from 
Richmond, and drove the forces of the enemy back 
toward New Market. Malvern Hill controlled the 
direct approach to Richmond. It was equally ne- 
cessary to occupy it, for a time, whether Richmond 
was to be attacked by McClellan from the James, or 
whether he was to be ordered to abandon the Pen- 
insula. On the 5th McClellan was himself at Mal- 
vern Hill, and thence he telegraphed to Halleck at 
I p. M. : " This is a very advantageous position to 
cover an advance on Richmond, and only fourteen 
and three quarter miles distant, and I feel confident 
that, with re-enforcements, I could march this army 
there in five days." To this there came the answer 
from Halleck, on the 6th, '' I have no re-enforce- 
ments to send you." 

The correspondence at this time shows the 
utmost impatience on the part of Halleck to have 
the retrograde movement begin, and the utmost 
exertions of McClellan to comply with his or- 
ders. By day and by night McClellan carried on 
his operations for the removal of the sick by all 
the means of transportation at his command. On 



22 MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 

the subject of the withdrawal of the army, it is 
necessary to follow this correspondence carefully. 
The determination of the Government to withdraw 
the army from the Peninsula was made known by 
a telegram which Halleck sent on the 3d and which 
McClellan received on the 4th. In this dispatch 
Halleck said : " You will take immediate measures 
to effect this, covering the movement the best you 
can. Its real object and withdrawal should be con- 
cealed even from your own officers. Your materiel 
and transportation should be removed first. You 
will assume control of all the means of transporta- 
tion within your reach, and apply to the naval 
forces for all the assistance they can render you. 
. . . The entire execution of the movement is left 
to your discretion." 

" I proceeded," says McClellan, " to obey this 
order with all possible rapidity, firmly impressed, 
however, with the conviction that the withdrawal 
of the Army of the Potomac from Harrison's Land- 
ing, where its communications had, by the co-oper- 
ation of the gunboats, been rendered perfectly se- 
cure, would at that time have the most disastrous 
effect upon our cause. I did not, as the command- 
er of that army, allow the occasion to pass without 
distinctly setting forth my views upon the subject 
to the authorities." The very impressive dispatch 
in which McClellan, on the 4th, placed before the 



TO THE REPUBLIC. 



23 



General-in-Chief the whole of the military argu- 
ment against the order for the removal of his army 
is too lengthy to be quoted in full, but it was re- 
markable for the cogency of its reasoning and the 
simple earnestness of its tone. It reads now like 
prophecy, but like the prophecy of one who was 
too sincerely anxious for the success of the cause 
to be gratified in the end by the fulfillment of his 
predictions. Yet he did not refrain, as a patriot 
should not have refrained, from letting the Govern- 
ment understand plainly what he plainly foresaw. 
" Your telegram of last evening," he said to Hal- 
leck, " is received. I must confess that it has 
caused me the greatest pain I ever experienced, 
for I am convinced that the order to withdraw this 
army to Aquia Creek will prove disastrous to our 
cause. I fear it will be a fatal blow. Several days 
are necessary to complete the preparations for so 
important a movement as this, and while they are 
in progress I beg that careful consideration may be 
given to my statements." He then enters into the 
argument, showing that, with his army then in ex- 
cellent discipline and condition, he was only twen- 
ty-five miles from Richmond, and that the gunboats 
could supply the army by water during its advance 
to within twelve miles of that capital, whereas the 
result of the retrograde movement that had been 
ordered would be a march of one hundred and 

2 



24 MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 

forty-five miles to reach the same point, and with- 
out the aid of the gunboats and water transporta- 
tion * He then concludes as follows : 

Add to this the certain demoralization of this army 
which would ensue, the terribly depressing effect upon the 
people of the North, and the strong probabiUty that it 
would influence foreign powers to recognize our adver- 
saries, and there appear to me sufficient reasons to make 
it my imperative duty to urge, in the strongest terms af- 
forded by our language, that this order may be rescinded, 
and that, far from recalling this army, it be promptly re- 
inforced to enable it to assume the offensive. 

It may be said that there are no re-enforcements avail- 
able. I point to Burnside's force ; to that of Pope, 
not necessary to maintain a strict defensive in front of 
Washington and Harper's Ferry ; to those portions of the 
Army of the West not required for a strict defensive there. 
Here, directly in front of this army, is the heart of the re- 
bellion; it is here that all our resources should be col- 
lected to strike the blow which will determine the fate of 
the nation. All points of secondary importance elsewhere 
should be abandoned, and every available man brought 
here. A decided victory here, and the military strength 
of the rebelUon is crushed ; it matters not what partial re- 
verses we may meet with elsewhere. Here is the true de- 

* Aquia Creek would be seventy-five miles from Richmond, with 
only land transportation all the way. From Harrison's Landing to 
Fortress Monroe would be a land march of seventy miles. 



TO THE REPUBLIC. 



25 



fense of Washington ; it is here, on the banks of the 
James, that the fate of the Union should be decided. 

Clear in my convictions of right, strong in the con- 
sciousness that I have ever been, and still am, actuated 
solely by love of my country, knowing that no ambitious 
or selfish motives have influenced me from the commence- 
ment of this war, I do now, what I never did in my life 
before — I entreat that this order may be rescinded. 

If my counsel does not prevail, I will with a sad heart 
obey your orders to the utmost of my power, directing 
to the movement, which I clearly foresee will be one of 
the utmost delicacy and difficulty, whatever skill I may 
possess. 

Whatever the result may be, and may God grant that 
I am mistaken in my forebodings, I shall at least have 
the internal satisfaction that I have written and spoken 
frankly, and have sought to do the best in my power to 
avert disaster from my country. 

George B. McClellan, 

Major- Ge?ieral commanding. 

The answer of General Halleck was at first 
communicated by telegram, on the 5th, saying that 
the order would not be rescinded, and that it must 
be executed with all possible promptness. He 
promised, liowever, to reply more fully by mail ; 
and on the 6th he wrote to McClelian a long letter, 
which set forth in detail the opposite argument and 
the reasons for the decision which had been made. 



26 MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 

Without meaning to detract in any degree from 
the earnestness of General Halleck's convictions, 
and conceding that he had a difhcult military pre- 
dicament to deal with, in consequence of the divis- 
ion of the Federal forces and the opportunity for 
the enemy to fall upon McClellan or upon Pope, at 
his pleasure — a difficulty which General Halleck 
did not create — there is still one question that re- 
mains to be considered, and in reference to which 
the Government must be held to have made a fatal 
mistake."^ When it had been determined to mass 
the Federal armies in front of Washington, the 
question of a commander, who was to be intrusted 
with the defense of Washington and with the ad- 
vance upon Richmond, if haply a new advance of 
the united armies should prove to be practicable, 
was certainly one of the last importance. Why 
was not this command given to McClellan? This 
question may be asked, and it must be answered, 
without reference to any wishes that he may be 
supposed to have had on the subject. We do not 
know that he had any. But we do know, that 
when a government has a military command of the 
utmost importance to bestow, it will, if it is swayed 

* It is almost too plain to require suggestion that if, on the one 
hand, the Confederates could fall upon McClellan and upon Pope 
separately, so also it was equally in the power of the Federal Govern- 
ment to divide and attack the Confederates, in separate masses, by 
ordering McClellan and Pope both to push toward Richmond. 



TO THE REPUBLIC. 2/ 

by the only motives that are fit to govern it, select, 
of its own unprompted and unbiased accord, the 
General who is most fit for the exigency. It may 
be said with perfect truth that McClellan, at the 
moment when it was determined to concentrate 
both the Army of Virginia and the Army of the 
Potomac in front of Washington, was the only Gen- 
eral within the reach of the Government who was 
qualified to take such a command. 

From the President down, through the various 
ranks of politicians or soldiers by whom he was 
surrounded, all knew in their hearts that the only 
reason why McClellan had failed to reach Rich- 
mond, and been obHged to execute his flank move- 
ment to the James, was because McDowell had 
been arrested by express orders from Washington 
on his march to effect a junction with McClellan's 
right. Everybody knew that McClellan had han- 
dled his army with consummate skill, on that flank 
movement, and had saved it from a vastly superior 
force of the enemy ; that under him that army had 
fought, on their perilous march, with almost unex- 
ampled bravery, preserving their discipline, and 
never once breaking into disorderly retreat, thus 
winning for their commander and themselves the 
applause and admiration of the most competent 
military judges at home and abroad. These were 
the patent facts that were before Mr. Lincoln and 



28 MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 

his advisers, in regard to McClellan's Peninsular 
campaign. Previous to that campaign, they knew 
what he had achieved in the West, before he was 
called to Washington, and what he had done after 
he came to the capital, in creating, organizing, and 
discipUning the best army that the United States 
had hitherto ever had. In addition to all this, the 
Government at Washington had before them the 
very important fact that there was no general in 
their service who could inspire officers and men 
with such an attachment to his person, and such 
devotion to the cause for which they fought, as 
McClellan could, and always had from the first. 
They knew him also to be unselfish, never waiting 
for arrangements that would promote his own am- 
bition, never making any conditions but such as the 
good of the service demanded. Yet McClellan 
was not asked to take this command. 

Why was this ? Must this question be answered 
by the suggestion that McClellan had written a 
letter to the President which had displeased him ? 
It must be remembered that, at the time of which 
we are now speaking, the Harrison's Landing letter 
had not been made public, and that it could have 
been seen only by the few persons in Washington 
to whom Mr. Lincoln ma}^ have shown it. As will 
hereafter appear, there was at least one member of 
Mr. Lincoln's Cabinet who knew nothing of the 



TO THE REPUBLIC. 29 

existence of this letter until the following winter. 
This gentleman, the Hon. Montgomery Blair, was, 
although not intimate with General McClellan, one 
of his steadiest supporters. It is probable, too, that 
Mr. Seward, the Secretary of State, who was always 
understood to hold General McClellan's military 
capacity and his patriotism in the highest estima- 
tion, knew nothing of this letter at this time. But 
there were other members of Mr. Lincoln's Cabinet, 
especially Mr. Chase and Mr. Stanton, who were 
exceedingly hostile to McClellan, to whom the 
President undoubtedly did show this letter, soon 
after he received it. If we are to conclude that 
Mr. Lincoln was personally displeased with General 
McClellan because he had written to him a private 
letter recommending a certain policy in the prose- 
cution of the war, and that this was the reason 
why the command of the combined armies was not 
offered to McClellan, we are irresistibly forced to 
the conclusion that Mr. Lincoln allowed his per- 
sonal feelings to prevent him from availing him- 
self and the country of the services of a general, in 
comparison with whom General Pope was not to 
be named in the same century. On the other hand, 
it is impossible to regard McClellan's earnest ad- 
vice, that the Army of the Potomac be permitted 
to remain at Harrison's Landing and be re-enforced 
for a new advance on Richmond, as any solid rea- 



30 MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 

son for not offering to him the command of the 
combined forces Avhen it had been determined to 
withdraw that army from the Peninsula. Every- 
body, the President included, knew that McClellan 
always did his whole duty, whoever shaped the 
campaigns, or however contrary the military policy 
of the Government might be to the dictates of his 
own judgment. 

One thing, however, will be found to be true as 
we proceed, namely, that there was a malign influ- 
ence over the President's counsels — an influence 
which had always been adverse to McClellan. We 
believe that Mr. Lincoln himself was not indisposed 
to place a very high degree of confidence in General 
McClellan's military ability and his patriotic devo- 
tion to the cause of the Union ; but, having allowed 
some of McClellan's bitterest enemies to see the 
private letter which McClellan had written to him, 
Mr. Lincoln put it in their power to do McClellan 
great injury. Ample as were Mr. Lincoln's oppor- 
nities for knowing McClellan, we do not think that 
he ever appreciated the straightforward sincerity 
and guilelessness of McClellan's nature. The two 
men were very unlike. The moral qualities which 
won the admiration and confidence of other men, 
and which were in so marked a degree united in 
McClellan with rare military abihties, we believe 
were not understood by President Lincoln. But 



TO THE REPUBLIC. 3 1 

we are not at all disposed to adopt the theory that 
the Harrison's Landing letter gave Mr. Lincoln any 
personal offense ; and, while we believe that he did 
not wish to do General McClellan injustice, we feel 
bound to relate the facts as they occurred, and to 
give them all the bearing which they should have 
upon a theory which has been suggested respecting 
the removal of McClellan from the command of the 
army after the battle of Antietam. 

General McClellan remained at Harrison's Land- 
ing until the i6th of August, superintending and 
providing for the removal of his army, with its 
immense trains and equipage. On the afternoon 
of that day, everything being arranged for the 
departure of the different corps, he left with an 
escort, and overtook the troops that were march- 
ing toward Fortress Monroe. He passed the col- 
umn, and arrived at that post on the 19th. On the 
23d he proceeded with his staff to Aquia Creek, 
where he arrived at daybreak on the 24th. Thence 
he telegraphed to Halleck the position of his 
troops, adding : *' Please inform me immediately 
exactly where Pope is, and what doing. Until I 
know that I can not regulate Porter's movements ; 
he is much exposed now, and decided measures 
should be taken at once. Until I know what my 
command and position are to be, and whether you 
intend to place me in the command indicated in 



32 MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 

your first letter to me, and orally through General 
Burnside at the Chickahominy, I can not decide 
where I can be of most use. If your determination 
is unchanged, I ought to go to Alexandria at once. 
Please define my position and duties." Halleck re- 
plied on the same day that he did not know where 
Pope was, or where the enemy in force was ; he 
said nothing about McClellan's future position. 
But on the 26th he telegraphed to McClellan, '* Per- 
haps you had better leave General Burnside in 
charge at Aquia Creek, and come to Alexandria, as 
very great irregularities are reported there." On 
the 27th, therefore, McClellan sailed for Alexandria. 
He left his cavalry escort at Fredericksburg for 
General Burnside. Every part of the army which 
he had lately commanded went forward to be under 
Pope's command. McClellan took with him noth- 
ing but his personal staff, a few orderlies, and the 
infantry guard of his headquarters, about five hun- 
dred men all told. He encamped with these at 
Alexandria, in a field near the river, about half a 
mile above the town, and reported for orders. 
There he was employed in forwarding troops and 
ammunition to Pope until the 30th. On the morn- 
ing of that day, heavy artillery-firing was heard in 
the direction of Fairfax Court-House. In the after- 
noon, McClellan telegraphed in answer to Halleck : 
" I have no sharp-shooters except the guard around 



TO THE REPUBLIC. 33 

my camp. I have sent off every man but these, and 
will now send them as you direct. I will also send 
my only remaining squadron of cavalry [now] with 
General Sumner. I can do no more. You now 
have every man of the Army of the Potomac who 
is within my reach." 

Seated in his tent, with nothing more that he 
could do, McClellan was left by the Government to 
listen to the ominous preliminary sounds of the 
great battle that was then commencing, separated 
from the troops who had loved and obeyed him 
with almost unparalleled devotion, and who now 
terribly needed his guiding hand and his inspiring 
presence. It needs no words of ours to figure to 
the reader the situation of this faithful officer. As 
in all the great trials of his life, so now in this, per- 
haps the greatest to which he was ever subjected, 
his own feelings, expressed with his habitual frank- 
ness, are the best guide to his character. At half- 
past ten o'clock of that evening (30th of August) he 
telegraphed to Halleck as follows : 

Camp near Alexandria, August 30, 1862—10.30 p. m. 
I have sent to the front all my troops with the excep- 
tion of Couch's division, and have given the orders neces- 
sary to insure its being disposed of as you directed. I 
hourly expect the return of one of my aides, who will give 
authentic news from the field of battle. 



34 



MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 



I can not express to you the pain and mortification I 
have experienced to-day in listening to the distant sound 
of the firing of my men. As I can be of no further use 
here, I respectfully ask that, if there is a probability of the 
conflict being renewed to-morrow, I may be permitted to 
go to the scene of battle with my staff, merely to be with 
my own men, if nothing more ; they will fight none the 
worse for my being with them. If it is not deemed best 
to intrust me with the command even of my own army, I 
simply ask to be permitted to share their fate on the field 
of battle. Please reply to this to-night. 

I have been engaged for the last few hours in doing 
what 1 can to make arrangements for the wounded. I 
have started out all the ambulances now landed. As I 
have sent my escort to the front, I would be glad to take 
some of Gregg's cavalry with me, if allowed to go. 

G. B. McClellan, Major-General. 

To this earnest appeal to be permitted to share 
the fate of his own men, there came tardily on the 
next morning from Halleck the cold reply, '' I can 
not answer without seeing the President, as Gen- 
eral Pope is in command by his order of the de- 
partment." Not one word of recognition of Mc- 
Clellan's patriotic and noble offer graced the dis- 
patch of the General-in-Chief. On the next day, 
the 31st, Halleck sent the following dispatch, dated 
at 10.7 P. M. : *' Since receiving your dispatch relat- 
ing to command, I have not been able to answer 



TO THE REPUBLIC. 35 

any not of absolute necessity. I have not seen the 
order as published, but will write to you in the 
morning. You will retain the command of every- 
thing in this vicinity not temporarily to be Pope's 
army in the field. I beg of you to assist me in this 
crisis with your ability and experience. I am en- 
tirely tired out." 

The *' order" referred to in this dispatch was 
one that emanated on the previous day from the 
War Department, by direction of Secretary Stan- 
ton, who now thought it well to utter a sneer at 
McClellan, while defining the commands of the dif- 
ferent generals. The order read as follows : 

War Department, August 30, 1862. 

The following are the commanders of the armies oper- 
ating in Virginia : 

General Burnside commands his own corps, except 
those that have been temporarily detached and assigned 
to General Pope. 

General McClellan commands that portion of the Army 
of the Potomac that has not been sent forward to General 
Pope's command. 

General Pope commands the Army of Virginia, and all 
the forces temporarily attached to it. 

All the forces are under the command of Major-Gen- 
eral Halleck, General-in-Chief. 

E. D. TOWNSEND, 

Assistant Adjutant-General. 



36 MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 

We have italicized the sting of this order, as 
most persons who read it at the time italicized 
it in their own minds. The whole country knew 
that everything had been taken irom McClellan's 
late command and sent forward to Pope; but the 
pubUc knew nothing of McClellan's earnest en- 
treaty to be sent into the field in any capacity 
in which he could be of use. Mr. Stanton saw 
fit, therefore, to say to the people of the Union, 
" We have shelved McClellan, and, as he sits 
there in his tent at Alexandria with a body-guard 
of a hundred wounded men, you can look at him 
if you like." But, in a few short and disastrous 
hours, the eyes of all men were turned toward 
the General who could not be permitted to risk 
his life on the battle-field, in leading even a bri- 
gade or a regiment, because General Pope was in 
command. 

On the morning of the ist of September, Mc- 
Clellan, appealed to by Halleck for assistance, rode 
into Washington and went directly to Halleck's 
ofhce. He told Halleck that Pope had been beaten. 
Halleck did not credit it. McClellan then told him 
that he ought to go out and see for himself. Hal- 
leck answered that he was too busy to go. " How 
can the General-in-Chief," said McClellan, " have 
more important business than to ascertain the con- 
dition of the army that is so near ? " Finally, HaL 



TO THE REPUBLIC, 37 

leek said he would send his Assistant Adjutant- 
General, Colonel Kelton. McClellan advised KeU 
ton to see the general officers and learn the exact 
state of things. On the same afternoon, McClellan, 
at the urgent request of Halleck, met the President 
at Halleck's house. The President expressed a fear 
that the Army of the Potomac was not cheerfully 
co-operating with and supporting General Pope ; 
that he (Mr. Lincoln) " had always been a friend " 
of McClellan, and he now asked, as a special favor, 
that McClellan would use his influence in correct- 
ing this state of things. McClellan assured the 
President that his fears were groundless. Mr. 
Lincoln was much moved, and he again request- 
ed McClellan to telegraph to " Fitz John Por- 
ter or some other of his friends," and try to do 
away with any feeling that might exist, adding 
that no one but McClellan could rectify this evil. 
'' I thereupon told him," says McClellan, " that 
I would cheerfully telegraph to General Porter, 
or do anything else in my power, to gratify his 
wishes and relieve his anxiety; upon which he 
thanked me very warmly, assured me that he 
could never forget my action in the matter, etc., 
and left. 

" I then wrote the following telegram to Gen- 
eral Porter, which was sent to him by the General- 
in-Chief " : 



38 MCCLELLANS LAST SERVICE 

Washington, September i, 1862. 

Major-General Porter ; I ask of you for my sake, 
and that of the country, and the old Army of the Poto- 
mac, that you and all my friends will lend the fullest and 
most cordial co-operation to General Pope in all the oper- 
ations now going on. The destinies of our country, the 
honor of our army, are at stake, and all depends now 
upon the cheerful co-operation of all in the field. This 
week is the crisis of our fate. Say the same thing to my 
friends in the Army of the Potomac, and that the last 
request I have to make of them is, that for their country's 
sake they will extend to General Pope the same support 
they ever have to me. 

I am in charge of the defenses of Washington, and am 
doing all I can to render your retreat safe, should that be- 
come necessary. 

George B. McClellan. 

PORTER'S REPLY. 
Fairfax Court-PIouse, 10 a. m., September 2, 1862. 
You may rest assured that all your friends, as well as 
every lover of his country, will ever give as they have 
given to General Pope their cordial co-operation and con- 
stant support, in the execution of all orders and plans. 
Our killed, wounded, and enfeebled troops attest our de- 
voted duty. 

F. J. Porter. 

It was, to use a familiar expression, very natural 
for the President to make this request, and equally 



TO THE REPUBLIC. 39 

natural for McClellan to comply with it, unneces- 
sary as he knew it to be. At such a time, a man 
hke McClellan could not stop to consider what im- 
plication he might leave to be made by his enemies 
and the enemies of his lieutenants, by sending such 
a dispatch to his friends in the Army of the Poto- 
mac. Porter's noble reply was characteristic. He 
knew that McClellan could not have volunteered 
to ask him to do his duty. It was just as plain to 
him that McClellan had been asked to send this 
dispatch as if the words "at the request of the 
President " had been written at the top of it. When 
Porter penned his answer, he was surrounded by 
the proofs of what he and his officers and men had 
done ; but, alas ! these proofs were not at that mo- 
ment visible at Washington, and, when the time for 
mvestigation came, the dark clouds of prejudice, 
passion, misconception, and misrepresentation shut 
out the truth. It was reserved to a better day and 
to discoveries almost providential, after long years 
of unmerited obloquy, to give to General Porter 
the most signal vindication that is recorded in the 
military annals of any nation. 

After his interview with the President, in the 
afternoon of September ist, General McClellan went 
to the house in Washington where his family then 
resided, and remained there that night. At half- 
past seven o'clock in the morning of the 2d, the 



40 



MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 



door-bell rang, and the President and General Hal- 
leck were ushered into the parlor. They said that 
Colonel Kelton had returned and reported a great 
disaster ; that there were fifty thousand stragglers 
already on the roads leading into Washington, and 
that the city could not be saved. The President 
was deeply moved. He asked General McClellan 
if he was willing to take the command, in that state 
of thmgs. McClellan expressed his willingness to 
take the command, and his belief that he could 
save the capital. Both Mr. Lincoln and General 
Halleck reiterated their fears that the enemy would 
enter the city. McClellan said he would stake his 
head on its safety. The President earnestly en- 
treated him to take the command, and he assented 
without hesitation, without making a single condi- 
tion or asking for a single promise of any kind. 
But what command did he then take ? The whole 
arrangement was verbal only, made in a moment 
of extreme peril. Not a scrap of written order was 
made when the President left General McClellan's 
house. 

Here, therefore, we must again pause to con- 
sider the unselfish devotion of the man to whom 
this appeal was made, and to note the peculiar 
magnanimity of his conduct. We will not ask our 
readers. to praise him for forgetting the injuries 
and indignities that he had received from every 



TO THE REPUBLIC. 4 1 

member of the Administration who had it in his 
power and was disposed to harm him. Patriotism 
can help even an ordinary man to separate his 
country from those who administer its affairs. But, 
when a general is placed in such a situation as that 
in which McClellan stood at that supreme moment, 
does not a rational and allowable regard for his 
own future demand that he make some provision 
for his own safety against the chances of war? 
" Will you," asked Mr. Lincoln, in his distress — 
" will you, dare you, take the command in such a 
dangerous crisis ? " The question was a consider- 
ate one. It was meant to bring to McClellan's 
mind the risk that he would run, and it was a kind 
and thoughtful act to remind him of it. The peril 
was instantly assumed by McClellan, without a 
thought concerning himself. But why did he not 
ask for a written order ? If he had no selfish con- 
ditions to make, no promises to exact, why did he 
not ask for a written order, defining the command 
which the President wished him to take ? It could 
have been written in three minutes. The question 
which we have asked is very important, for two 
reasons ; That he did not stipulate for a written 
order, shows how little he was considering his own 
safety. Again, as will appear hereafter, his want 
of written orders from that time forth exposed him 
to perils far beyond the loss of reputation that 



42 MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 

would have followed his failure to save the capital 
from falling into the hands of the Confederates. 
Let him be blamed, if there are any who are dis- 
posed to blame him, for not exercising the average 
prudence of one who owes it to himself to be made 
as safe as, in a perilous enterprise, he can be. But 
let no generous and just person fail to see what he 
risked, or withhold from him the recognition of his 
extraordinary forgetfulness of himself when he had 
to confront a great danger for his country. That a 
written order defining McClellan's command could 
have been prepared on the spot, and that it must 
have been given if he had asked for it, can not be 
doubted. Both the President and the General-in- 
Chief knew that Pope had been beaten, very badly 
beaten, and that he could not be relied upon to 
save the capital. They knew that he was in full 
retreat, and that there was great disorder. Deli- 
cacy toward Pope, at such a moment, should not 
have restrained them from superseding him, or 
anybody else, by ordering McClellan to go to 
the front and assume the supreme command, if 
he had asked for such orders. Nor was there 
afterward any good reason, whether McClellan 
asked for them or not, for not giving him writ- 
ten orders defining his command and his duties, 
before he marched into Maryland, fought the bat- 
tles of South Mountain and Antietam, and drove 



TO THE REPUBLIC. 43 

Lee back into Virginia. But we must return to 
our narrative. 

When the President and General Halleck left 
General McClellan's house on the morning of Sep- 
tember 2d, the latter immediately sent for his staff 
and got on horseback. He at once visited various 
points in and around the city, and made provisional 
arrangements for receiving and disposing of the 
troops. It was his intention to go to the front and 
take the command of the retreating army. But 
in an hour or two a staff officer came to him from 
General Halleck with a message that he was not 
to go out and take the command, but that he was 
to wait the arrival of the troops just in front of the 
defenses of Washington. He then spent the morn- 
ing in perfecting the arrangements for receiving 
the troops. The truth is, that many of the military 
and civil authorities in Washington at that moment 
believed the city to be in such peril that the Presi- 
dent did not dare to permit McClellan to go be- 
yond the immediate defenses of the capital. It was 
beheved that the Government would have to fly, 
until McClellan's arrangements had, during that 
night, restored something like confidence to the 
officials and the inhabitants. 

At about one o'clock on that day, McClellan 
rode out to Upton's Hill, three or four miles on the 
Virginia side of Washington. He arrived there 



44 MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 

between two and three o'clock. At this spot he 
met the first brigade of the retreating forces, some- 
what in advance of the main body. Generals Pope 
and McDowell rode in the middle of a regiment of 
cavalry. General McClellan said to General Pope 
that he would relieve him of the command, and 
asked for information of the roads on which the 
different corps were then retreating. Nothing very 
satisfactory was obtained. At that point heavy ar- 
tillery-firing was heard in the distance. General 
Pope said that the attack was on Sumner's corps. 
General McClellan asked if it was a severe attack, 
and General Pope replied that he thought it was. 
McClellan then said that he should go forward to 
the scene of this cannonading. Generals Pope and 
McDowell asked if they could go into Washington, 
and, on being informed that they could, they rode 
on. McClellan went forward with one aide and 
three orderhes across the country in the direction 
of the firing, to reach the troops engaged. He 
struck the column on the Lewinsville road, about 
six miles from Upton's Hill. At this point the first 
body of troops of the regular service recognized 
him, and instantly raised a great shout, which went 
down the lines for miles back. The men who did 
not see him inferred from the shouts of their com- 
rades that he was again in command. Those who 
were about him insisted on his leading them back 



TO THE REPUBLIC, 45 

against the enemy. But no, it could not be ; his 
orders restrained him. It was now evening, and 
darkness had settled down upon the landscape. 
McClellan pushed on toward Sumner's rear, and 
found that the firing had ceased ; from which he 
concluded that Sumner's corps could reach in safe- 
ty the position he had assigned for it. He then re- 
turned rapidly to Washington, and remained the 
greater part of the night near the chain-bridge, re- 
ceiving reports and giving orders. During that 
night the troops as they came in were posted, and 
the next day, the 3d, was spent by McClellan in 
rectifying their positions. During that day the 
enemy disappeared from the front of Washington, 
and McClellan's information satisfied him that he 
intended to cross the upper Potomac into Mary- 
land. "This," he says in his report, "materially 
changed the aspect of affairs, and enlarged the 
sphere of operations ; for, in case of a crossing in 
force, an active campaign would be necessary to 
cover Baltimore, prevent the invasion of Pennsyl- 
vania, and clear Maryland." On the 3d McClellan 
reported to Halleck in person that he had sent for- 
ward the Second, Twelfth, and Ninth Corps to va- 
rious positions on the roads north of Washington. 
Halleck asked who had been put in command of 
those corps. McClellan answered that he had des- 
ignated no one to command them, but if there 



46 MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 

should be any necessity for them to act, in conse- 
quence of the enemy suddenly crossing the river, 
he would command them himself. Halleck replied 
that it had not been determined who should com- 
mand the troops sent out from Washington. Mc- 
Clellan therefore rejoined that he would not assign 
any one to command those troops, but would look 
out for them himself. At least on two or three 
other occasions, Halleck repeated what he had said 
about the command of troops sent out from Wash- 
ington as a thing not determined. 

It is now necessary to return to the previous 
day, the 2d of September, the day on which the 
President and General Halleck ordered General 
McClellan to take command and save the capital. 
At some time during that day the following order 
emanated from the War Department : 

War Department, Adjutant-General's Office, 
Washington, September 2, 1862. 

Major-General McClellan will have command of the 
fortifications of Washington, and of all the troops for the 
defense of the capital. 

(By order of Major-General Halleck.) 
E. D. TowNSEND^ Assistant Adjutant-General. 

Construed by the existing state of things on that 
day, when it was expected that the fortifications of 
Washington would be immediately assailed by the 



TO THE REPUBLIC. 47 

enemy, the meaning of this order was plain. Con- 
strued by the state of things on the following day, 
when the enemy was moving north with an evident 
purpose to cross into Maryland above Washington, 
what did this order mean ? Where would theyi be 
the defense of Washington ? Within its fortifica- 
tions, or beyond them? What would be the 
"troops for the defense of the capital," with the 
command of which General McClellan had been 
invested ? Strange to say, this was the only writ- 
ten order, defining McClellan's command, that ever 
proceeded from the War Department from that 
day until after McClellan had driven Lee across 
the Potomac. We have seen that General Halleck 
on the 3d did not consider the command of troops 
advancing beyond the immediate fortifications of 
Washington as settled ; nor was it formally settled 
at any time thereafter until McClellan was displaced 
by Burnside. It was practically impossible for Mc- 
Clellan, while forwarding the troops, to busy him- 
self with the settlement of the precise limits and 
scope of his command. He had consented, at the 
earnest entreaty of the President and General Hal- 
leck, to undertake for the safety of the capital. 

The rapidly-shifting scenes of this extraordinary 
drama, enlarging every hour the sphere of defen- 
sive operations until they would have to pass into 
offensive movements, left no time for McClellan to 



48 MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 

ask for more expanded orders. It was the duty of 
the Government to foresee and provide for the 
moment when he would have to go out of the forti- 
fied defenses of the city, and defend it and Balti- 
more and Pennsylvania by aggressive attacks on 
the advancing hosts of the Confederates. But for 
this they never provided, by written orders, defin- 
ing McClellan's command. McClellan kept on for 
four days, making movements of the troops on the 
roads which led north from Washington. On the 
7th, he ordered up his staff and escort and started 
for the head of the moving columns. But, before 
he rode out of Washington, he left his card as 
major-general for the President, the Secretary of 
State, and General Halleck. The President and 
General Halleck he saw. Halleck did not object 
to the movement of the troops. The President 
asked General McClelkin if he had seen the Secre- 
tary of War, and begged him to do so as a personal 
favor. McClellan called upon Mr. Stanton, who 
received him with exuberant expressions of affec- 
tion, said that he had always been McClellan's best 
friend, that bad men had made mischief between 
them, but that he should nevertheless always con- 
tinue to support him cordially. Embracing the 
General with tenderness, Stanton bade him God- 
speed. But the General had not been gone from 
the War Department five minutes, when the Secre- 



TO THE REPUBLIC. 49 

tary spoke of him in terms of gross and shocking 
abuse. 

Whether he trusted or distrusted the Secretary 
at that time, there was nothing for McClellan to do 
but to go forward and take the command. There 
was no one else who could take it — no one else 
who could handle that army. He could not stop 
to make conditions. He could think of but one 
thing — how to arrest the descent of Lee upon 
Washington, and to drive him back into Virginia. 
Shortly before the battle of South Mountain, which 
occurred on the 14th, General Lee w^as seated in 
his tent reading a dispatch that had been brought 
to him at that moment. General Longstreet, who 
was with him, asked for the news. " The worst 
possible news," vSaid Lee ; " McClellan is again in 
command." 

We do not propose to describe battles, the de- 
tails of which are familiar to all who have read of 
them. One thing, however, is not to be over- 
looked. During the first five days that followed 
McClellan's return to active duty, there had been 
no time to properly complete the re-equipment of 
the troops which came pouring into Washington 
after Pope's defeat. All military persons know 
that whatever may be the spirit of an army, after 
such fighting, such a defeat, and such a retreat, to 
put it again in active and aggressive movement, 



50 MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE. 

with the proper material for long marches and en- 
counters with the same foe, is a mighty work. 
The best that McClellan could do, before he 
marched out of Washington, was to restore in some 
degree the shattered organizations of the different 
corps, and to assign to them their lines of march. 
His movements northward had to be made care- 
fully, so as not to uncover Washington before the 
enemy's position and plans were developed. But 
he was constantly impeded by General Halleck's 
cautions not to be too precipitate. On the loth he 
learned from his scouts that Lee's army was proba- 
bly in the vicinity of Frederick. On the 13th an 
order issued by General Lee on the 9th fell into 
McClellan's hands. It revealed the whole of Lee's 
plans. On the 14th the battle of South Mountain 
occurred, in which the Confederates were defeated, 
with a great loss in killed and wounded, and 1,500 
prisoners were taken. The aggregate Federal loss 
was 1,568. On the following day, this dispatch 
came from the President to General McClellan : 

War Department, Washington, 
September 15, 1862 — 245 p. m. 

Your dispatch of to-day received. God bless you, 
and all with you. Destroy the rebel army, if pos- 
sible. 

A. Lincoln. 
To Major-General McClellan. 



TO THE REPUBLIC. 



51 



General McClellan pressed forward his army 
in pursuit of the enemy, and on the 17th the 
long and desperately contested battle of Antietam, 
in which nearly the whole of the troops on both 
sides were actively engaged, ended in the defeat of 
the Confederates. On the night of the i8th the 
Confederate army recrossed the Potomac into Vir- 
ginia, leaving 2,700 of their dead unburied on the 
field. Thirteen guns, thirty-nine colors, upward of 
fifteen thousand stand of small-arms, and more than 
six thousand prisoners, were captured by the Fed- 
erals in the three battles of South Mountain, Cramp- 
ton's Gap, and Antietam, without losing a single 
gun or a single color. The grand aggregate of the 
Federal killed, wounded, and missing, in the battle 
of Antietam, was 12,469. The total number of the 
Federal forces was 87,164 men. The enemy had 
about 10,000 more. 

On the night after the battle of Antietam, Mc- 
Clellan anxiously deliberated w^hether he should 
pursue the enemy. If he had done so, and had 
lost the next battle, Lee could have marched as he 
pleased on Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, 
or New York. Nowhere east of the Alleghanies 
was there another organized force that could have 
arrested his march through an undevastated coun- 
try, levying tribute as he went along from popu- 
lous and wealthy cities. It would not do for Mc- 



52 MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 

Clellan to risk another battle with less than absolute 
assurance of success. The elements of even a prob- 
able assurance of success were entirely wanting. 
The troops were overcome by the fatigue and ex- 
ertion of the prolonged and severe battle of the 
17th, and the day and night marches of the three 
previous days. The supply-trains were in the rear, 
and the troops had suffered from hunger. They 
required rest and refreshment. The means of 
transportation, if the troops had been immediately 
pushed across the Potomac, were inadequate to 
furnish a single day's supply of subsistence in ad- 
vance. Ten general officers and many regimental 
and company officers, and a great number of the 
enlisted men, had been killed or disabled. Above 
all, it should not be forgotten that this army which 
had, under McClellan, thus fought and won these 
two sanguinary battles, was the same army that 
had come back to Washington disheartened by the 
defeat which it had suffered under General Pope, 
and that many of its organized bodies had left be- 
hind, lost, or worn out the greater part of their 
clothing and camp equipage, which required re- 
newal before they could be in a suitable condition 
again to take the field. General McClellan, there- 
fore, properly determined that the army should 
rest and be refitted. 

But now there broke forth from all the organs 



TO THE REPUBLIC. 



53 



of the Administration the bitterest reproaches of 
McClellan and accusations of his slowness and in- 
efficiency. Why did he not pursue Lee ? Why 
did he not follow up the advantages he had gained? 
Hesitation, too much deliberation, a total want of 
" dash " — these were his supposed failings. The 
people of the North did not know, or did not heed, 
the fact, that McClellan held no orders but that one 
which had invested him with the command of the 
troops for the defense of Washington. It was only 
by acting on the military principle of offensive-de- 
fensive war that he could lead his army sixty or 
seventy miles from Washington in aggressive at- 
tacks upon Lee. When he had reached the Poto- 
mac and driven Lee beyond it, his order, upon the 
broadest construction, was exhausted. But, while 
a senseless clamor was incessantly dinned into the 
public ear, General McClellan was constantly occu- 
pied in reorganizing, drilling, and endeavoring to 
supply his army, and in watching and guarding all 
the passes of the river for a long distance. While 
this was going on, the President determined to 
make a visit to the army, and to learn for himself 
the real state of affairs. He arrived at General 
McClellan's headquarters on the ist of October, 
and remained there three days. He rode over the 
field and made himself fully acquainted with the 
details of the battle. To several of General Mc- 



54 



MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 



Clellan's officers he expressed in the strongest 
terms his thanks for what had been done, spoke of 
McClellan with great praise, and said that his con- 
fidence in him was entire. On the last day of his 
visit he had a long conversation with McClellan 
himself. They sat together on a rock in the neigh- 
borhood of the General's tent, some of the staff 
standing near. The President said to McClellan 
that the only fault he had ever had to find with 
him was that he was too '' slow " ; that he had 
thought so heretofore, but that he now saw his 
mistake ; that he was the only General in the serv- 
ice who could handle a large army; that he had 
his absolute and entire confidence ; that he must go 
on and do what he thought right — move when he 
was ready, and not before — and, when he moved, 
do as he thought best ; that he must make his mind 
easy, that he should not be removed from the com- 
mand, and that he should have his (Mr. Lincoln's) 
full and unqualified support. The President had 
seen the destitute condition of the army, and prom- 
ised that it should be remedied as quickly as prac- 
ticable. He then went away. 

It appears to us that the President, after his re- 
turn to Washington, continued for a short time to 
be as firm in his support of McClellan as it was in 
his nature to be in regard to anything. But the 
bad influences soon began to work anew ; and Mr. 



TO THE REPUBLIC. 55 

Lincoln apparently did not fortify himself against 
those influences, by making known to the members 
of his Cabinet who were unfriendly to McClellan 
the pledges that he had given on the field of Antie- 
tam. On the 6th of October, about three days after 
Mr. Lincoln's return, General Halleck sent the fol- 
lowing dispatch, which General McClellan received 
on the 7th : 

Washington, D. C, October ti, 1862. 

Major-General McClellan : I am instructed to 
telegraph you as follows : The President directs that you 
cross the Potomac and give battle to the enemy, or drive 
him south. Your army must move now, while the roads 
are good. If you cross the river between the enemy and 
Washington, and cover the latter by your operations, yoa 
can be re-enforced with thirty thousand men. If you move 
up the valley of the Shenandoah, not more than twelve or 
fifteen thousand can be sent to you. The President ad- 
vises the interior line between Washington and the enemy, 
but does not order it. He is very desirous that your army 
move as soon as possible. You will immediately report 
what line you adopt, and when you intend to cross the 
river. Also to what point the re-enforcements are to be 
sent. It is necessary that the plan of your operations be 
positively determined on before orders are given for build- 
ing bridges and repairing railroads. I am directed to add 
that the Secretary of War and the General-in-Chief fully 
concur with the President in these instructions. 

H. W. Halleck, Gemral-in- Chief. 



56 MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 

This order was, of course, entirely inconsistent 
with what the President had said to McClellan 
only three or four days previously — that he was to 
move when he was ready and not before. But the 
order is to be explained by the " pressure " of 
which Mr. Lincoln often spoke, and which was 
constantly brought to bear upon him whenever and 
wherever McClellan was concerned. The last sen- 
tence of the dispatch shows the quarter from which 
the pressure came. The Secretary of War and the 
General-in-Chief had persuaded the President to 
speak in this order as if he did not intend to leave 
General McClellan to act on his own judgment as 
the President had voluntarily promised to do. The 
whole occurrence is a strong illustration of the folly 
of giving such orders to a general in the field who 
must know whether his army is in a condition to 
march into the enemy's country better than his 
government at home, unless he is entirely unfit for 
his place. If he is, he should be at once super- 
seded. If he is not unfit for his position, his judg- 
ment should be followed, and everything should be 
done for him that is needful. As we proceed, we 
shall adduce not only the old but some entirely 
new and conclusive proof that General McClellan 
was right, and that the Secretary of War and the 
General-in-Chief were wrong. 

At the time of the receipt of this dispatch of the 



TO THE REPUBLIC, 57 

6th, notwithstanding the appearance of a peremp- 
tory direction to march which the Secretary and 
the General-in-Chief had infused into its words, it 
is apparent from the context that something was 
left to General McClellan's discretion as to the hne 
of movement, and that the President could not be 
persuaded to make the order peremptory in this 
particular. Moreover, General McClellan had to 
construe this order by the solemn assurance that 
Mr. Lincoln had given him, only a few days before, 
that he should not be required to move on the 
enemy before he was ready. Whether he was to 
invade Virginia by either of the two lines indicated 
in the order, the fact of his being or not being in a 
condition to make an aggressive movement into the 
enemy's country remained exactly as it in truth 
was. The condition of his army was a most essen- 
tial element in the problem, by whatever line he 
was to move. That condition had not changed in 
the three days that elapsed from the time when the 
President himself saw what it was ; and, as we go 
on, we shall show that it had not so materially 
changed, for three weeks after the date of this 
order, that the army could have been safely 
marched upon a new and aggressive campaign in 
the enemy's country. 

General McClellan fought the battles of South 
Mountain and Antietam without any written order 



58 MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 

defining his command, excepting the ambiguous 
one of September 2d — ambiguous, that is to say, 
after the date on which it was issued from the War 
Department. What, then, would have been his 
fate if he had lost those battles, and especially the 
last ? We must carry the reader back to a period 
when mean rivalries, deep hatreds, and vengeful 
prejudices had their sway. It can not be doubted 
that, if McClellan had been defeated in the battle 
of Antietam, he would have had to answer for it 
before a court-martial, and that his blood would 
have been demanded. We know what deeds were 
done in that period under the forms and mockeries 
of military justice. McClellan's bitterest enemies 
were among those who, from their official stations, 
would have had the power, which they would not 
have scrupled to use, to arraign him for having 
assumed a command to which he had not been 
legally assigned. They could have pointed to the 
narrow scope of the order of September 2d, and 
they would have pointed to the lives of brave men 
that had been lost and the public property that had 
been destroyed beyond what, they would have con- 
tended, was the scope of the only authority that he 
had received which could avail him as a legal order. 
In suffering McClellan to be thus exposed, Presi- 
dent Lincoln would seem to have been unconscious 
of what a strain might be brought upon his own 



TO THE REPUBLIC. 59 

sense of executive justice if any disaster should be- 
fall the General who had taken the command at 
his earnest personal entreaty, and who had been 
left without a proper legal authority for the acts 
which he was expected to perform. Beyond all 
doubt it would have cost Mr. Lincoln the deepest 
pain if any misfortune had exposed one hair of Mc- 
Clellan's head to any danger. At the base of Mr. 
Lincoln's statue which stands in the heart of this 
metropolis, and is passed every day by half a mill- 
ion of people, there is inscribed a legend which im- 
putes to him that he had " charity for all, malice 
toward none." We may believe that the ascription 
is just. But what would Mr. Lincoln's amiable 
qualities have availed against the hatreds, the 
machinations, and the devices of McClellan's ene- 
mies if he had not been victorious in the battles 
which he fought without other than an implied 
authority for fighting them? When McClellan 
overtook and gave battle to the enemy on the field 
of Antietam, he may without exaggeration be said 
to have twice taken his life in his hand."^ 

* General McClellan was under fire during the battle of Antie- 
tam several times, and on each occasion for a considerable period, 
and with great exposure. His duties required him to expose him- 
self both to artillery and infantry fire, at many critical periods of 
the day. At one time, he rode along the lines for the very purpose 
of drawing the fire of a supposed concealed battery, in order to re- 
veal its position. It opened upon him and his staff as soon as they 
were within range. 



6o MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 



PART II. 

The battle of Antietam had been fought and 
won, on the 17th of September, 1862. General Lee 
had retreated across the Potomac on the night of 
the 1 8th. General McClellan, for reasons which 
we have detailed in our former paper, had deter- 
mined that in the condition of his army after the 
battle an immediate advance into the enemy's coun- 
try was impracticable ; and, moreover, he had 
reached the utmost limit from which, according to 
the only order that he then held, he could be justi- 
fied in offensive movements. He had fought the 
battle of Antietam for the defense of Washington ; 
in command of " the troops for the defense of the 
capital," as the order of September 2d was framed ; 
and even by this construction of his authority he 
had taken upon himself a vast responsibility. The 
President, on the ist of October, had visited the 
scene of the battle, learned the exhausted and des- 
titute condition of the army, told General McClel- 
lan that he should not be ordered to move until he 



TO THE REPUBLIC. 6 1 

was ready, and voluntarily promised that he should 
be continued in command. 

There now arose a very extraordinary condition 
of things. A general was in the field, at the head 
of an army of nearly one hundred thousand men, 
awaiting orders. But that army needed indispen- 
sable supplies, before it could be put in motion in 
pursuit of the enemy, and many of its departments 
required reorganization. It had, too, to perform 
the duty of guarding the passes of a long reach of 
the Potomac against a new invasion of Maryland 
and a sudden descent upon Washington. The 
higher officials at the seat of Government, who had 
the control of military affairs, began at an early 
period after the battle of Antietam to call in ques- 
tion the truth of General McClellan's representa- 
tions, that he was not receiving the supphes which 
he needed to enable him to execute an order to ad- 
vance into the enemy's country, where he could 
not anticipate that his march would not be op- 
posed. Under all ordinary circumstances, a gov- 
ernment would unhesitatingly accept the represen- 
tations of a general in the field, situated as McClel- 
lan then was, respecting the condition of his army 
and the possibility of an advance. Of all the 
military men who were in high commands during 
any part of our late war, McClellan was peculiarly 
fitted to know at all times the condition of his 



62 MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 

troops. His accomplishments as an organizer were 
very remarkable; his habits of attention to the 
wants of his troops were unceasing ; and he never 
relaxed his vigilant oversight of details of a minute 
character. Nor were his ability and judgment as a 
strategist inferior to his powers as an organizer. 
All this was well known to the authorities in Wash- 
ington. Without the existence, therefore, of some 
very extraordinary reason, furnishing a motive, 
good or bad, for not trusting General McClellan as 
Mr. Lincoln had voluntarily promised on the field 
of Antietam to trust him, it is very difficult to ac- 
count for the fact that an issue was gotten up in 
the counsels at Washington respecting the truth of 
General McClellan's representations of the condi- 
tion of his army. 

From the nth to the 28th of October, General 
McClellan constantly complained in his dispatches 
that his requisitions for supplies had not been met, 
so as to render it practicable for him to advance 
into the enemy's country upon an aggressive cam- 
paign. It is well known that there has been an as- 
sertion, transmitted from that day to this, that 
everything which he had asked for had been for- 
warded ; and it has been charged that it was in 
consequence of a constitutional indecision and 
want of vigor that he did not cross the Potomac 
in pursuit of Lee at least as early as the loth of 



TO THE REPUBLIC. 63 

October. Perhaps one half of the nation to-day be- 
lieve this to be true, because it was officially assert- 
ed. It is certainly untrue. The question is a ques- 
tion of fact, to be judged upon evidence ; and to be 
judged upon principles of belief such as we apply 
to any disputed matter of history. In that manner 
we shall examine this assertion. 

We have presented to our readers, from Presi- 
dent Lincoln's own lips, indubitable proof that the 
army was in no condition to move on the ist of 
October. We shall now descend mto details, and 
shall show that General McClellan was right in 
saying, as he did in his report, that, down to the 
28th of October, his army still lacked the very sup- 
plies which were essential to any general move- 
ment of its corps. The imperative wants of the 
army, after the battle of Antietam, were very nu- 
merous. Persons who are not professionally ac- 
quainted with such matters can not easily conceive 
of the kinds and quantities of things with which an 
army in active operations must be constantly sup- 
plied. We conceive of the soldier as a man whose 
wants have been systematically reduced to the 
minimum that is consistent with his efficiency. He 
stands before our imaginations well and appropri- 
ately clad, from the crown of his head to the sole 
of his foot, and with his musket, his knapsack, his 
ammunition-belt, and his canteen. All superfluities 



64 MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 

are discarded, and he bears on his person nothing 
that is not absolutely needful to his vocation, and 
everything that is needful in the best possible con- 
dition. But the vast materiel with which the field 
depots of an army must be constantly filled, in 
order to keep this human machine, the soldier, in 
marching or fighting condition, and provide for 
him when he is wounded or sick, we can bring be- 
fore us only by an effort of the mind, applied to 
practical details. We must think of the supply- 
trains and the thousands of draught-animals re- 
quired to serve them, and to serve the artillery, 
and of the horses of a higher class to remount the 
cavalry. We must think of clothing, and food, and 
forage ; of hospital stores, of shelter-tents, of am- 
munition, of tools for intrenching purposes, of me- 
chanical implements for all the manifold uses of a 
great multitude of men who can safely depend for 
nothing that is wanted upon the country around 
them. We must remember, too, that nothing is so 
destructive as war; that in a single battle a well- 
equipped army, even if victorious, may be reduced 
to a state bordering on destitution ; and that a long 
and hurried march of troops may strip them of in- 
dispensable supplies if they get beyond the base 
from which their supplies are to come. Recollect- 
ing these things, we may be prepared to examine 
the wants of General McClellan's army after the 



TO THE REPUBLIC. 65 

battle of Antietam, not forgetting the important 
fact that it had been taken up by him after the de- 
feat at the second Bull Run, in a condition of great 
derangement, and had been employed in marching 
or fighting from the 3d to the 17th of September, 
in which two weeks Maryland had been freed from 
the presence of the enemy and Washington had 
been saved. 

The principal wants of this army, after the bat- 
tle of Antietam, consisted of horses and forage, am- 
munition and food, and shoes and clothing for the 
men. Whenever an order might come to General 
McClellan enlarging the sphere of his operations 
and bidding him advance across the Potomac, he 
could be in no condition to obey it unless these in- 
dispensable wants of his army had been supplied. 
Horses, forage, ammunition, and food came for- 
ward slowly ; but without shoes and clothing no 
army could be moved, and the deficiencies of this 
army in shoes and clothing continued to be enor- 
mous down to a very late period after the order of 
October 6th to cross the Potomac and give battle 
to the enemy or drive him south was received. 
The reports of the army quartermasters, made to 
General McClellan's headquarters between the 15th 
and the 25th of October, leave no possible room for 
doubt that between those dates large bodies of the 
army were so destitute of shoes, clothing, and other 



66 MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 

indispensable supplies, that a general movement 
was impossible before it commenced. The chief 
quartermaster, Colonel Ingalls, reported on the 
loth, four days after the date of the President's 
order to advance, '* The suffering and impatience 
are excessive " ; and unless we suppose that he and 
the corps commanders, and the division and regi- 
mental quartermasters, were all engaged in a com- 
mon conspiracy with General McClellan to misrep- 
resent the condition of the troops, we must accept 
their statements as true. Some of the corps com- 
manders sent their wagon-trains repeatedly on long 
journeys to the depots where the supplies should 
have been, and the wagons came back empty. 
Even on the 30th, after the movement across the 
Potomac began, some of the corps had not received 
their supplies, and did not receive them until they 
were crossing the river. Of course, it is entirely 
immaterial what may have appeared on the books 
or records of the Quartermaster-General's office in 
Washington in regard to the supplies ordered for 
the Army of the Potomac. The sole question is, 
When were they delivered at the depots of the 
army in Maryland, sixty or seventy miles from 
Washington? No one must lose sight of and no 
one must be permitted to obscure the issue : and it 
must not be forgotten that it was the duty of the 
authorities in Washington not only to order the 



TO THE REPUBLIC. ^J 

supplies, but to cause them to be placed where 
they were wanted. 

General McClellan's report contains a tabular 
statement of clothing and equipage received at the 
different depots of the Army of the Potomac, from 
the 1st of September to the 31st of October. It 
will be remembered that the battles of South 
Mountain and Antietam had been fought before 
the 1st of October. In whatever condition the 
army may have left Washington between the 3d 
and the 7th of September, the supplies received be- 
fore or during those battles could not have made 
up the deficiencies caused by the marching and 
fighting of the two weeks prior to the i8th of Sep- 
tember, the day on which Lee's army was with- 
drawn into Virginia. The tabular statement above 
referred to shows that by far the greater bulk of 
most of the enumerated articles reached the depots 
of the army between the 15th and the 25th of Octo- 
ber. But, from the 25th to the 31st there came in, 
of the single article "boots," 20,040, being 6,240 
more than were received prior to the 25th. Of 
" bootees," there were received 52,900, between 
October 15th and 25th, being 43,900 more than 
were received before the 15th. Of ''stockings," 
there came in, between the 15th and the 25th, 
65,200; and between the 25th and the 31st, 30,000; 
being 95,200 received since October 15th, and 



68 MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 

amounting to 66,975 more than had been received 
prior to the 15th. A comparison of the other arti- 
cles enumerated, '4orage-caps," ''cavalry-jackets," 
"canteens," "flannel shirts," "haversacks," "trou- 
sers," "coats," "shelter -tents," " camp - kettles," 
" mess - pans," '' overcoats," " artillery - jackets," 
"blankets," "felt hats," "knit shirts and drawers," 
shows like results. There were, for example, 
70,000 drawers received between the 15th and the 
31st, being 42,300 more than all the supplies of this 
article that reached the army from the ist of Sep- 
tember to the 15th of October. On these facts, if 
we know how to deal with facts, we think our read- 
ers will concur with us in believing that Colonel 
Ingalls might well say on the loth of October that 
the suffering and impatience were excessive ; for 
let it be observed that these indispensable sup- 
plies, which came in so slowly, after the Presi- 
dent's order of the 6th of October had directed 
a march, came, when they did come, to fill earnest 
and pressing requisitions upon the authorities in 
Washington, made continuously from the nth to 
the 28th. 

But we have not yet done with this branch of 
our subject. During the period of General Mc- 
Clellan's reiterated complaints that he was not re- 
ceiving supplies indispensable to an advance into 
Virginia, the President, supposing that something 



TO THE REPUBLIC. 



69 



was wrong, caused a step to be taken by a gentle- 
man in whom he had entire confidence, and who 
was in every way qualified to ascertain the ex- 
act state of General McClellan's army. This was 
Colonel Thomas A. Scott, of Pennsylvania, who had 
been Assistant Secretary of War at a former pe- 
riod. From him we have obtained, through a com- 
mon friend, the information given in a letter, dated 
at Philadelphia on the 19th of February of the pres- 
ent year [1880], from which we are permitted to 
take the following extracts: 

I had been actively engaged, about the time of Lee's 
[threatened] invasion of Pennsylvania, in locking after 
the defenses of our own border, especially in connection 
with the safety of our own lines of road. In the perform- 
ance of this duty, I was necessarily called to Washington 
a number of times, and, while there, about the middle of 
October, 1862, I had a conversation with Mr. Stanton, 
Secretary of War, and President Lincoln, in regard to the 
delay in the movement of General McClellan's army, and 
its reported condition of inefficiency to effect a movement 
without proper and greatly needed supplies. At the re- 
quest of the President and Secretary of War I went to 
General McClellan's headquarters, near Harper's Ferry, 
and stated to him the object of my visit. General Mc- 
Clellan then said that it was not a matter that required 
discussion, but that he would have Major Myers, chief 
quartermaster of his staff, or rather of the Army of the 



70 



MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 



Potomac,* show me the requisitions that had been made 
for supplies, and also a statement of the amount received, 
and that I could draw my own inferences from these data 
as to whether his army had been properly supplied or was 
in a condition to move. He stated that he was not only 
short of shoes, clothing, and other necessaries for the 
men, but he had not the horses to move his cavalry and 
artillery, and, notwithstanding he had requested it, he 
had not been authorized to procure his horses from the 
country where his army lay, although he felt sure that he 
could do so more promptly and more cheaply than the 
horses could be furnished from Washington. 

I said to General McClellan that both the President 
and the Secretary of War were under the impression that 
all supplies for which he had made requisitions had been 
furnished him, and that they could not understand why 
that should be given as a reason for his failing to move. 

On learning the facts I have stated, I immediately re- 
turned to Washington, saw Mr, Stanton, General Halleck, 
and the President, and told them the exact state of the case. 
Both Mr. Stanton and General Halleck then repeated 
their assurance that all General McClellan's requisitions 
had been met ; and it was then suggested that, as the 
troops in the forts around Washington constituted a part 
of the Army of the Potomac, the supplies that were in- 
tended for General McClellan's army in the field, instead 
of having been sent to him at Harper's Ferry, had by 
some means or other been diverted for the use of the 

* Major Myers was the assistant quartermaster with Colonel Ingdls. 



TO THE REPUBLIC. 



71 



troops in the fortifications, and thus had failed to reach 
him. This proved to be the explanation of the trouble, 
and, in conference with the President, he requested the 
Secretary of War to see that the supplies needed were 
forwarded at once to General McClellan's army at Har- 
per's Ferry, and also that General McClellan was given the 
necessary authority to make requisitions upon the country 
for the horses needed for his army movement. Both of 
those things were, of course, done instantly, and the 
result was that General McClellan moved his army — I 
think in less than a fortnight after the supplies had been 
forwarded. 

It is apparent, from the internal evidence of the 
dispatches, that Colonel Scott's visit to the army 
and his report to the President must have occurred 
at some time between the 20th and the 28th of 
October. After the 20th there was an evident 
change of tone in the dispatches which General 
Halleck sent to General McClellan by order of the 
President. Thus, on the 21st Halleck telegraphed 
to McClellan: "Your telegram of 12 M. has been 
submitted to the President. He directs me to say 
that he has no change to make in his order of the 
6th instant. If you have not been, and are not 
now, in a condition to obey it, you will be able to 
show such want of ability. The President does not 
expect impossibilities ; but he is very anxious that 
all this good weather should not be lost. Tele- 



72 



MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 



graph when you will move, and on what lines you 
propose to march." Now, although General Hal- 
leck in an official letter, which he wrote to the Sec- 
retary of War on the 28th, still said that in his 
opinion there had been no such want of supplies as 
to prevent General McClellan's compliance with 
the orders to advance against the enemy, yet it is 
apparent that the President knew on the 21st that 
there must be reason to doubt the correctness of 
this opinion, and that he would not then permit 
McClellan to think that impossibilities were re- 
quired of him. We therefore date the return of 
Colonel Scott from the army and his report to the 
President at some time after the 21st of October; 
and, from the fact that sufficient supplies had not 
been received on the 28th, and that on the ist of 
November the last body of the army crossed the 
Potomac, we conclude that the supphes which 
Colonel Scott caused to be forwarded from Wash- 
ington were dispatched on the 28th, 29th, or 30th 
of October. 

The figures which we have given above, taken 
in connection with Colonel Scott's statements, 
show that between the 6th and the 25th of October 
the forts around Washington must have been 
gorged with supplies, while General McClellan's 
army in the field was left destitute. Was this a 
blunder of " red tape," or w^as it intentional ? Who 



TO THE REPUBLIC. 



73 



caused it, or who was responsible for it ? Things 
are sometimes allowed to occur without leaving 
any trace by which the just responsibility for them 
can afterward be fixed. Whether it was by acci- 
dent or design that General McClellan's requisi- 
tions were not filled until after the discovery was 
made by Colonel Scott of the real state of affairs, 
the detention of McClellan's army on the Maryland 
side of the Potomac until after the 28th of October 
is accounted for.* 

* While these pages are passing through the press, we have re- 
ceived the results of a research which has been kindly made for us by 
the officials of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company, at their 
depot in Washington. These results establish the following facts : 
I. During the month of October, 1862, the shipments of supplies for 
General McClellan's army, made from Washington, consisted chiefly of 
regimental baggage, medical stores, ammunition, harness, hardware, 
and iron. Some clothing was sent, but not in proportion to other arti- 
cles. 2. On the 28th, 30th, and 31st of October, no shipments of 
clothing were made from Washington ; but on the 29th there were 
seven packages and two boxes for the Fifth Regiment of New York 
Volunteers, and one hundred and fifty-two boxes consigned to Captain 
Alexander Bliss, at Harper's Ferry, accompanied by a special agent. 
This was the supply of clothing spoken of by Colonel Ingalls, the 
Chief Quartermaster, which was intended for Sumner's corps, and 
which Colonel Ingalls in his report said came almost too late for issue, 
as the army was then crossing into Virginia. (See McClellan's Re- 
port, p. 424.) 3. Everything intended for General McClellan's army 
was dispatched from the Washington depot as soon as it was received 
there and could be loaded. The large quantities of clothing, shoes, 
and other supplies, embraced in the tabular statement given in Gen- 
eral McClellan's report, and which were received at the army depots 
from the 25th to the 31st of October, were sent from Philadelphia, or 
Harrisburg, to Hagerstown ; and a comparison of the dispatches sent 
by Colonel Ingalls to Harrisburg and his report leave no room to 



74 



MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 



But we must for a moment retrace our steps, 
and must again remind the reader that, from the 2d 
of September until the 6th of October, McClellan 
had no orders under which he could act otherwise 
than on the defensive. It has always seemed to us 
of the highest importance to ascertain, if possible, 
what were the counsels of Stanton and Halleck, 
and their compeers, which preserved intact that 
inexplicable and unparalleled state of things — Mc- 
Clellan and his great army without definite orders 
until the 6th of October. " General McClellan will 
have command of the fortifications of Washington 
and of all the troops for the defense of the capital," 
remained his sole order from the 2d of September 
to the 6th of October. Mr. Lincoln knew that Mc- 
Clellan had no orders except to act on the defen- 
sive, and that he could not advance except at his 
peril. How was it, and by whom was it, that Mr. 
Lincoln was made to keep things in this condition 
for the space of five weeks ? We can conceive of 
but one rational explanation of his conduct, which 
will relieve it from a criticism that we do not wish 
to make. He may have considered, down to the 
battle of Antietam, as McClellan did, that the order 

doubt that the effect of Colonel Scott's visit to the army and his report 
to the President was that, in the last days of October, there was the 
same (although late) activity in sending supplies to Hagerstown from 
Pennsylvania that was produced in sending supplies to Harper's Ferry 
from Washington. 



TO THE REPUBLIC. 75 

of September 2d, to act on the defensive, ended at 
the Potomac when McClellan had driven Lee across 
that river. If so, the period between the date of 
the battle of Antietam, September 17th, and the 6th 
ol October was a period when McClellan was both 
waiting for orders to advance and waiting for indis- 
pensable supplies. The order came to McClellan 
on the 7th of October, and the supplies that were 
absolutely necessary to enable him to execute it 
came at the end of three weeks afterward.* 

We have now to describe briefly the plans 
which General McClellan had in view, after he 
crossed the Potomac, for dividing the forces of the 
enemy so that he could attack and beat them in de- 
tail. Six days sufficed for the march of fifty miles 
from the Potomac to Warrenton, after the last 
corps of the army had crossed ; notwithstanding 
that heavy rains delayed the movement consider- 
ably in the beginning, and three of the corps had to 
wait at least one day at the crossings to complete 
their necessary supplies. At the end of the six 
days. General McClellan had made the different 
dispositions of his troops which his plans for ad- 

* The cruel suffering inflicted upon the soldiers by this failure to 
supply them with necessaries could be described by living witnesses in 
terms that we can not command. It is a fact that many men, in a 
corps led by a gallant officer who has depicted to us their condition, 
marched from the Potomac to Warrenton with bare and bleeding feet, 
and could not be shod until they reached that place. 



^6 MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 

vancing against the enemy contemplated. His 
headquarters were at Rectortown on the 6th of 
November. The main body of his infantry had 
then reached Warrenton, and his advanced cavalry 
lay some miles south of that place, toward Culpep- 
per Court-House. Although, in the order of Octo- 
ber 6th, the President had advised an interior line 
of movement so as to place the army between 
Washington and the enemy, yet he did not per- 
emptorily direct it, and on the 26th of October 
General Halleck had telegraphed to General Mc- 
Clellan as follows : " Since you left Washington, I 
have advised and suggested in relation to your 
movements, but I have given you no orders. I do 
not give you any now. The Government has in- 
trusted you with defeating and driving back the 
rebel army in your front. I shall not attempt to 
control you in the measures you may adopt for 
that purpose ; you are informed of my views, but 
the President has left you at liberty to adopt them 
or not as you may deem best." Two observations 
may be made here : First, that General McClellan 
was to make his own plans for the campaign and to 
be responsible for them ; second, that it was Gen- 
eral McClellan who had been intrusted with the 
duty of defeating or driving back the enemy. Yet 
General Halleck was then preparing in Washing- 
ton the evidence which was to be used to furnish 



TO THE REPUBLIC, 77 

the ostensible reason for removing General Mc- 
Clellan from the command, before he could encount- 
er the enemy by the plans which he had been left 
at liberty to adopt. Our readers will observe, as 
we proceed, that it could not have been on account 
of his intended strategy that General McClellan 
was to be removed ; but that the evidence, which 
was to furnish a plausible ground for his removal, 
related wholly to the unnecessary delay on the 
field of Antietam which General Halleck and oth- 
ers in Washhigton falsely imputed to him. 

The plan of campaign which General McClellan 
had adopted before he reached Rectortown can be 
best described in his own words : 

The plan of campaign I adopted during the advance 
was to move the army well in hand parallel to the Blue 
Ridge, taking Warrenton as the point of direction for the 
main body, seizing each pass in the Blue Ridge by de- 
tachments as we approached it, and guarding them after 
we had passed, as long as they would enable the enemy to 
trouble our communications with the Potomac. It was ex- 
pected that we would unite with the Eleventh Corps and 
Sickles's division near Thoroughfare Gap. We depended 
upon Harper's Ferry and Berlin for supplies, until the 
Manassas Gap Railway was reached ; when that occurred, 
the passes in our rear were to be abandoned, and the 
army massed ready for action or movement in any direc- 
tion. 



yS MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 

It was my intention, if, upon reaching Ashby's or any 
other pass, I found that the enemy were in force between 
it and the Potomac, in the valley of the Shenandoah, to 
move into the valley and endeavor to gain their rear. I 
hardly hoped to accomplish this, but did expect that, by 
striking in between Culpepper Court-House and Little 
Washington, I could either separate their army and beat 
them in detail, or else force them to concentrate as far 
back as Gordonsville, and thus place the Army of the Po- 
tomac in position either to adopt the Fredericksburg line 
of advance upon Richmond, or to be removed to the Pen- 
insula, if, as I apprehended, it were found impossible to 
supply it by the Orange and Alexandria Railroad beyond 
Culpepper. 

He then gives in detail the positions in which 
he had placed the different corps of his army, in 
accordance with this plan, down to the 6th of No- 
vember, adding : "■ Had I remained in command, I 
should have made the attempt to divide the ene- 
my, as before suggested ; and, could he have been 
brought to battle within reach of my supplies, I 
can not doubt that the result would have been a 
brilliant victory for our army." 

At this time, the distance between the advanced 
pickets of General McClellan's cavalry and Long- 
street's position at Culpepper Court-House was 
hardly six miles ; and, from the compact mass of 
Federal troops collected around Warrenton to 



TO THE REPUBLIC, 79 

Longstreet's position, the distance was not quite 
eighteen miles. At the same time General Lee, 
with the other half of his army, was about thirty 
miles to the northwest from McClellan's advanced 
position, and somewhat more than that from Long- 
street. General McClellan might, therefore, have 
well anticipated that he would be able to separate 
the two wings of the Confederate army, beating 
Longstreet separately, or forcing him at least to fall 
back upon Gordonsville. In that event, to transfer 
the Federal army to Richmond would have been 
only a question respecting its base of supply. If it 
could not have been supplied directly from Wash- 
ington, beyond Culpepper Court-House, it could 
have been thrown upon the Peninsula and have 
found its old base on the James, with all the advan- 
tages of water transportation. The accompanying 
map shows the positions of the Federal and the 
Confederate troops on the 7th and 8th of November. 
At a late hour on the night of November 7th, 
a special messenger from the War Department 
reached General McClellan's tent at Rectortown, 
bearing the following order : 

Headquarters of the Army, 
Washington, D. C, November 5, 1862. 

General : On the receipt of the order of the Presi- 
dent sent herewith, you will immediately turn over your 
command to Major-General Burnside, and repair to Tren- 



8o MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 

ton, New Jersey ; reporting on your arrival at that place 
for further orders. 

Very respectfully, your obedient servant, 

H. W. Halleck, General-in-Chief. 
Major-General McClellan. 

War Department, Adjutant-General's Office, 
Washington, November 5, 1862. 

General Orders No. 182. 
By direction of the President of the United States, it 
is ordered that Major-General McClellan be relieved from 
the command of the Army of the Potomac, and that Ma- 
jor-General Burnside take the command of that army. 
By order of the Secretary of War : 

E. D. TowNSEND, Adjutant- General. 

General Burnside arrived at General McClel- 
lan's tent with the messenger who brought the or- 
der. Having read the order, McClellan handed it 
to his successor, saying quietly, " Well, Burnside, 
you are to command the army." At an early hour 
on the next morning, McClellan, accompanied by 
his staff, rode toward Warrenton. The order chang- 
ing the command had not then been promulgated 
to the army. As McClellan passed the columns on 
the road to Warrenton, the men greeted him as 
usual with their enthusiastic cheers, but they looked 
inquiringly and anxiously into his face, for they 



TO THE REPUBLIC, 8 1 

had somehow, they knew not why, begun to fear 
that something extraordinary was about to happen. 
This foreboding, half-bewildered study of his coun- 
tenance met him at every step. If the troops had 
known what he knew, what would have been their 
feelings, their demonstrations, their fears ! He rode 
on, giving no sign of what was in his thoughts, 
but making his customary acknowledgments of the 
affectionate greetings of the men. After he reached 
Warrenton, a day was spent in viewing the posi- 
tions of the troops and in conferences with Gen- 
eral Burnside respecting future operations. In the 
course of that day the order was published, and 
General McClellan issued a farewell address to the 
army. On the evening of Sunday, the 9th, there 
was an assembly of officers who came to take leave 
of him. On the loth he visited some of the vari- 
ous camps, and, amid the impassioned cries and 
demonstrations of the men, he took a last look of 
the troops who had followed him with such unfal- 
tering devotion. *■ History," he said to the officers 
who crowded around him — " history will do justice 
to the Army of the Potomac, even if the present 
generation does not. I feel as if I had been inti- 
mately connected with each and all of you. Noth- 
ing is more binding than the friendship of com- 
panions in arms. May you all in future preserve 
the high reputation of our army, and serve all as 



82 MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 

well and faithfully as you have served me ! " On 
the nth, at Warrenton Junction, he entered with 
his staff a railroad train that was about to start 
toward Washington. Here there was stationed a 
detachment of two thousand troops. They were 
drawn up in line, and a salute was fired. The men 
then broke their ranks, surrounded the car in which 
he was seated, uncoupled it from the train and ran 
it back, insisting wildly that he should not leave 
them, and uttering the bitterest imprecations against 
those who had deprived them of their beloved 
commander. The scene has been described to us 
by an officer who was present as one of fearful ex- 
citement. The moment was critical. One word, 
one look of encouragement, the lifting of a finger, 
would have been the signal for a revolt against law- 
ful authority, the consequences of which no man 
can measure. McClellan stepped upon the front 
platform of the car, and there was instant silence. 
His address was short. It ended in the memorable 
words, '* Stand by General Burnside as you have 
stood by me, and all will be well." The soldiers 
were calmed. They rolled the car onward, re- 
coupled it to the train, and with one long and 
mournful huzza bade farewell to their late com- 
mander, whom many of them were destined never 
to behold again. General McClellan reached Wash- 
ington on the following day, and without tarrying 



TO THE REPUBLIC, 



83 



for an hour proceeded at once to Trenton, where 
he arrived at four o'clock in the morning of the 
1 2th. From that time he never again saw Lincoln, 
or Stanton, or Halleck. 

It is not inappropriate to consider here what 
was squandered by the Administration when they 
took McClellan from the service of the country. 
Aside from all his other powers, in which his use- 
fulness as a general far exceeded those of any other 
man who was then on this side of the Alleghany 
range, there can be no question that he possessed 
the rare power of inspiring his troops with confi- 
dence in his abilities and attachment to his person, 
to a very uncommon degree. What was the secret 
of his power over men? Why was it that they 
loved him and fought under him so bravely, so 
steadily, oftentimes against odds that would have 
made an army quail under another leader? Dur- 
ing the seven days of the perilous march to the 
James, there was terrible fighting ; but the Army 
of the Potomac saved its honor, although attacked, 
through a whole week, by a far larger force, led 
by some of the ablest generals in the Confederate 
service. If McClellan, when he ordered that flank 
movement, had been suddenly superseded by any 
other general who can be named, that army would 
have been annihilated. When the combined forces 
under Pope were driven back upon Washington in 



84 MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 

a disorderly rout, why was it that, the instant Mc- 
Clellan's restoration to command became known, 
the old enthusiasm, discipline, and order were re- 
stored, as if by magic? Why did the officers 
and the troops fight at Antietam as we know they 
did fight — no important movement in the battle, 
save one, failing to be executed when the order 
for it was first given?* What, we again ask, 

[* The order here alluded to was an order given by General Mc- 
Clellan personally to General Bumside, on the night before the battle 
of Antietam, to lead his command across a certain bridge at daylight 
on the next morning, and to operate at once against the enemy on the 
other side of the stream. How mafty times this order was repeated, 
after General McClellan learned during the battle that General Burn- 
side had not moved, and what were the consequences of the order not 
being obeyed when it should have been, can be accurately known only 
when the surviving officers who are cognizant of the facts have been 
heard from, and when other persons who received the facts orally from 
General McClellan have repeated them. The Congressional " Com- 
mittee on the Conduct of the War " examined both General McClellan 
and General Burnside in February and March, 1863, but the Commit- 
tee took very good care not to draw out from either of those generals 
the important facts respecting the time when General Bumside first 
received this order from General McClellan. General McClellan vol- 
unteered no testimony on the subject of this order. General Bumside 
did not state when he Jlrst received the order to carry the bridge ; but 
the inference from what he did state is that at ten o'clock on the day 
of the battle he was awaiting an order from General McClellan to 
make the attack on the biidge, and he stated that "the bridge was 
carried about half-past one o'clock " ; that he received the order to 
make the attack on the bridge at "about ten o'clock." It is within 
the knowledge of persons now living that the carrying of that bridge 
was a very important part of the plan of the battle which General Mc- 
Clellan settled on the previous night ; that he gave the order person- 
ally to General Burnside on that night ; that the order was to make 
the attack at daybreak on the following morning ; that the order was 



TO THE REPUBLIC. 85 

was the secret of McClellan's power over an 
army? 

It is worth while to analyze such a power if we 
can, because, when it exists, it constitutes, for a 
government that is at war, one of its dearest posses- 
sions. It is a pubUc property, as valuable as any 
other resources for successful warfare, and there- 
fore requiring the most careful and conscientious 
husbandry. A government that throws away such 
a moral power might as well cripple itself by de- 
stroying one half of its physical means. It has 
often been said that an army is a machine, and that 
the more nearly it approaches to the condition of 
a physical machine, which is absolutely under the 
control of an operator, the better army it is. But 
this idea of an army, at least in modern times and 

not executed then ; that it was repeated several times ; and that the 
officer who carried it the last time (about noon) was directed to super- 
sede General Burnside on the spot, and lead the column himself, if 
General Burnside did not instantly move. General McClellan was 
summoned before and examined by the '* Committee on the Conduct 
of the War " long after the Administration had displaced him in the 
command of the Army of the Potomac and made General Burnside his 
successor, and after all the events had occurred in which General Mc- 
Clellan had any personal share. His reticence respecting this order 
at the battle of Antietam was in accordance with his habitual delicacy 
toward other officers. The members of the Committee, however, if 
they meant to elicit the truth, and to ascertain why the Confederate 
forces were not entirely crushed in that battle, were under no such re- 
straint. But they were under the influence of personal and political hos- 
tility to General McClellan, which made them both willing and eager to 
throw all blame upon him, and to shield every one else at his expense.] 



S6 MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 

in wars in which a great public principle is at 
stake, requires a good deal of modification. An 
army is a machine, but it is a moral and conscious 
machine, as well as a physical one. It has feelings, 
passions, intelligence, quick perceptions, and a ca- 
pacity to understand what is required of it. That 
impalpable essence which is called the esprit de 
corps of an army, what is it but the aggregate feel- 
ing of a great body of men, into which are fused 
for a time the moral existences of the individuals 
that compose the mass? Take two soldiers from 
the ranks, and compare their differences in cour- 
age, physical strength, power of endurance, intelli- 
gence, and spirit of obedience, and the differences 
will often be found to be very great. But there is 
a resultant of these qualities, when the average is 
formed by the union of a great mass of individual 
characters in one organization, and that resultant 
of moral and physical forces is the complex ma- 
chine with which a commander has to deal. 

In studying the careers of distinguished gen- 
erals who have possessed something more of power 
over their armies than the mere authority of their 
stations gave them, it will be found that the in- 
dividual character of the man has had a great deal 
to do with his influence over his troops. There 
have been commanders in whom the passion for 
personal glory has been the strongest force in their 



TO THE REPUBLIC. 87 

natures ; and when the national character has been 
one that feels national glory to be the greatest of 
all objects, and that character has pervaded the 
armies, deeds almost superhuman have been done. 
When Napoleon I fulminated his bombastic ad- 
dresses to his troops, he touched a chord of the 
national honor in their breasts, a feeling for the 
honor of France, while he at the same time aroused 
in them a passionate sympathy with his own glory. 
When we turn to commanders of an entirely differ- 
ent moral character, we must still look to their 
personal qualities for the secret of whatever ex- 
traordinary influence they may have exercised over 
their troops, and must also take into consideration 
the national character and the nature of the war. 
In our late civil war there was a principle at stake 
on both sides, which the masses of the armies on 
both sides well understood, from the first. Per- 
haps there were greater numbers of soldiers of 
foreign birth in the Federal than there were in the 
Confederate armies, but this foreign element did 
not prevent the national character and the national 
feeling from predominating over and pervading the 
whole. As a general thing, the soldiers of foreign 
birth in the Federal service understood and be- 
lieved in the importance of the principle at stake 
as well as the native Americans ; and, when the 
Federal conscription took place, it was the popular 



88 MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 

conviction of the necessity for re-establishing the 
Union under one government that caused a general 
submission of all classes to a measure that was un- 
questionably beyond the limits of constitutional 
authority. 

General McClellan himself was a most conspic- 
uous embodiment of the national feeling for the 
Union, which existed throughout the States that 
adhered to the Federal Government, as he was of 
the general conviction that the welfare of the whole 
country required that State secession be sup- 
pressed. He had and he used a great power to 
impart this feeling and conviction to his troops. 
Officers and men who fought under him knew what 
they were fighting for, and they knew it all the 
better and felt it all the more intensely because of 
the example given to them by a commander whom 
they respected for his virtues, and loved for his 
conscientious care of their lives. They knew that 
he had a great heart as well as a wise head. They 
knew that in executing his orders they were obey- 
ing a mind equal to any emergency that they had 
to encounter ; and that for those who would have 
to meet death, or wounds, or disease, there would 
be that tender pity which is the soldier's greatest 
consolation, and that this softer quality of human 
nature was in McClellan blended with the most 
robust manliness. Such was the feeling toward 



TO THE REPUBLIC. 89 

him, alike among officers and men ; but the former 
regarded him with a larger recognition. They saw 
in him a representation of the best attributes of our 
national character — of its cultivation, its instructed 
energy, its moral and religious principle, its capa- 
city to encounter difficulties, its devotion to duty, 
its disdain of unworthy arts, its superiority to vul- 
gar ambitions, its power of self-control when in- 
juries, and injustice, and obloquy, are heaped upon 
faithful and true-hearted service. To this we must 
add the effect, upon all classes, of what it is difficult 
to describe, but it is something that all can under- 
stand. It goes by the name of personal magnetism. 
It is that charm of the personal presence, which is 
compounded of what beams from the countenance 
and is expressed in the manners, and what is in- 
tuitively felt to be the nature of the man. It is a 
mysterious influence, but a very powerful one. 
There have been highly distinguished military men 
who have not had a particle of this power, and 
whom one never cares to see a second time. But, 
when this power is possessed, it is a great treasure. 
The dying boy, on the field of Antietam, who raised 
himself on his elbow as his general rode by in the 
heat of the battle, shouted out the familiar name 
with the most affectionate endearments, and then 
dropped dead upon the turf, might have told the 
great men at Washington what they would lose if 



90 MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 

they should take this commander from the head of 
that army. 

We shall close our discussion of this subject in 
the next number of the Review, with a considera- 
tion of the political reason which is supposed to 
have operated upon President Lincoln, and to have 
caused him to remove General McClellan from the 
command of the Army of the Potomac. We have 
shown that the alleged unnecessary delay after the 
battle of Antietam could not have been publicly as- 
signed by the President as a reason for this act. 
The delay was known to the President, nearly two 
weeks before the date of the order changing the 
command, to have been occasioned solely by the 
want of indispensable supplies. It remains for us, 
therefore, to examine the political reason which has 
been suggested as the explanation of the President's 
course. This will bring us to the character and 
purpose of the Harrison's Landing letter, which 
General McClellan wrote to Mr. Lincoln just four 
months before he was ordered to turn over the 
command to General Burnside and to report at 
Trenton. 



TO THE REPUBLIC, 91 



PART III. 

There remains for us but one subject for dis- 
cussion in connection with the historical events 
over which we have passed in the preceding pa- 
pers. This relates to one of those popular errors 
which sometimes become so fixed as matters of 
belief that they seem to have passed into history 
as if they were not to be controverted. It has long 
been assumed by many persons that General Mc- 
Clellan's Harrison's Landing letter to Mr. Lincoln 
was intended as a political manifesto of his own. 
The popular shrewdness in making such imputa- 
tions is always well satisfied with its own wisdom, 
however little of intellectual or moral penetration 
may be exercised in making them. And therefore, 
to present a plain view of a virtuous man, acting 
from motives in which self has no concern, often 
seems to be a useless appeal against that which has 
been popularly pronounced to be unquestionable. 
But the power to appreciate sincerity and eleva- 
tion of character, the capacity to do justice upon 



92 MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 

facts, the disposition to believe in the existence of 
pure and disinterested aims, have not wholly fled 
even from the present age. It was, therefore, with 
entire confidence that we should not want an audi- 
ence, and a very large one, that we undertook to 
give an account of some of the circumstances at- 
tending General McClellan's relations to the Ad- 
ministration of President Lincoln, and especially of 
the strange occurrence of his removal from com- 
mand after the battle of Antietam. The approba- 
tion which we have received from many of the 
wise and good has fully justified and rewarded our 
labors. 

The breaking out of our civil war found Gen- 
eral McClellan in private life, and in a lucrative 
employment which he could not surrender with- 
out great sacrifices. It is no disparagement of the 
patriotism of any others of the distinguished sol- 
diers of whatever rank, on either side of that con- 
test, to say that McClellan was actuated by a pure 
sense of duty, and not by political ambition, when 
he tendered his sword to the Government of the 
United States. He had been educated in its mili- 
tary service ; and he had so learned of its political 
institutions that every conviction of his intellect 
and every feeling of his heart bound him to the 
preservation of the Union. He had had, at a very 
early age, great opportunities for acquiring mili- 



TO THE REPUBLIC. 



93 



tary knowledge in the war with Mexico. He had 
been afterward sent, at the expense of the Govern- 
ment, while in the flower of his youth, to increase 
that knowledge by personal observation of one of 
the most gigantic wars of modern Europe. The 
facilities w^hich he there enjoyed, along v/ith col- 
leagues who were much his seniors in age and mili- 
tary rank, had enabled him to accumulate a fund of 
professional information which was even more ex- 
tensive than it could have been if he had held a 
command in either of the contending armies. In 
Mexico, under our own captain, Scott, he had 
seen the teachings of his education confirmed — 
that war is a science. In the Crimea he had seen 
that science applied on the grandest scale, and in 
the most exact methods, by the armies of three 
nations. He had afterward been engaged in em- 
ployments that gave him an uncommon familiarity 
with the geographical features, the resources, and 
the peculiarities of vast regions of our own country. 
So that, when our national conflict was culminating 
to a territorial civil war and a struggle for the 
supremacy of our national Constitution, he did not 
feel himself at liberty to withhold from the service 
of his country any part of that wealth of experience 
and knowledge which his country had enabled him 
to have. It was a simple case of paying back a 
debt; and, from the time when he undertook to 



94 MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 

discharge it to the moment when he was summarily 
retired into complete inactivity and intended dis- 
grace, he never did an act, or uttered a word, or 
wrote a line that was not inspired by a sense of 
patriotic duty, or that any man can justly impute 
to a selfish motive. 

Probably in all military history there is no 
sudden and unexplained removal of a commander, 
who was on the eve of a w^ell-planned movement 
against the enemy, which furnishes a parallel to 
this case of General McClellan. Certainly there is 
none for which it is so difficult to assign a respect- 
able motive. On the 7th of November, when Mc- 
Clellan is about to divide Lee's army, an order 
suddenly reaches him, requiring him to turn over 
the command to a general whom neither the army 
nor the public had reason to regard, and who did 
not regard himself, as competent to the position, 
and to go into a disgraced retirement. So extraor- 
dinary an act demands investigation. It is one of 
the unsolved points in the history of the late war, 
on which the inquirer must enter with the expecta- 
tion of finding either an adequate or an inadequate 
reason for the act. 

We have for many years been seeking and di- 
gesting information on this subject, but, when we 
began to write upon it, the first thing that oc- 
curred to us was the necessity for knowing whether 



TO THE REPUBLIC. 



95 



the subject ol General McClellan's removal was 
laid by Mr. Lincoln beiore his Cabinet, at any time 
previous to the issuing of the order, and whether 
any and what determination was then announced 
by the President. In order to ascertain this we 
recently addressed a note to the only survivmg 
member of Mr. Lincoln's Cabinet, and received 
from him the following reply : 

Washington, January 21, 1880. 

My dear Sir: I have yours of the 19th, asking if 
the removal of McClellan from command was discussed 
in the Cabinet before the order was given, and in reply I 
have to inform you that it was. The meeting was at- 
tended by Halleck, and it was stated by him that the 
excuses given by McClellan for not moving were untrue. 
I recollect particularly that in reference to a supply, I 
think, of shoes, which General McClellan had written 
were indispensable and had not been received, Halleck 
undertook to show, by official statements of shipments 
made, that McClellan had not stated the truth. 

I opposed the removal violently, upon the ground that 
Hooker, who was the person spoken of for the succession, 
was entirely incompetent for the position. Burnside's 
name was not mentioned, and I was utterly amazed when 
I saw it announced. I had to accept as true the state- 
ment that McClellan had been making unnecessary de- 
lay, although, as it turned out afterward, the charge was 
wholly unfounded. Governor Curtin was in McClellan's 



96 MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 

camp at the time, and afterward stated that it was true 
that McClellan had not the shoes required for his men to 
move. 

Mr. Lincoln did not decide at that time to remove 
McClellan, but I saw that he was coming to that conclu- 
sion, and I went out to Silver Spring for my father to go 
that night to the Soldiers' Home, where Mr. Lincoln was 
then staying, to endeavor to prevent the removal. He 
accordingly went that night to see Mr. Lincoln, and spent 
a long time in arguing against the proposal, telling Lin- 
coln that it would be both a military and political blunder 
for him to take that step ; that the opposition to McClel- 
lan came from Chase and Stanton, who were hostile to 
him (Lincoln), and that the man whom they wanted to 
supersede McClellan with would be also adverse to him if 
he succeeded ; and, if he failed, he (Lincoln) would have 
to bear the reproach of it. Lincoln listened with atten- 
tion to all my father had to say, but was not communica- 
tive himself. But at the end of the conference he rose up 
and stretched his long arms almost to the ceiling above 
him, saying: "I said I would remove him if he let Lee's 
army get away from him, and I must do so. He has got 
the 'slows,' Mr. Blair!" 

It was manifest to me that there was something more 
than I knew of, of which McClellan's opponents were 
availing themselves against him. I had stood by McClel- 
lan as I did by Grant against the attempts made by Stan- 
ton and Chase, and other politicians, in their efforts to 
overslaugh them, without being in the confidence of either 



TO THE REPUBLIC, 



97 



of these generals. I did not know till McClellan visited 
me, while attending the Porter trial the winter afterward, 
and read me his Harrison's Landing letter, what it was 
that made Lincoln so deaf to my own and my father's 
efforts. But, when McClellan read that letter, I told him 
at once that it was that letter which had enabled Stanton 
and Chase to remove him. It had been used to make 
Lincoln look upon him as a rival, and he had judged him 
from that point of view; and, while I believed Lincoln to 
be as unselfish as any man, he was yet a man, and no man 
could be told day by day that another was making use of 
the place he gave him to supersede him in his own place, 
without being afterward against him and ready to believe 
that he was both unfriendly and unfit for his position.* 
Yours truly, 

Montgomery Blair. 

George T. Curtis, Esq., New York. 

* [Mr. Blair's explanation of Mr. Lincoln's feelings toward Mc- 
Clellan, and of the mode in which he allowed himself to be influenced 
by McClellan's enemies, is quite plausible, perhaps it is quite true. 
But what weakness does it not suggest ! General McClellan could not 
possibly become a formidable political rival to Mr. Lincoln, in 1862, 
unless he should succeed in crushing the rebellion. To end the war, 
then and there, by defeating the Confederate forces in front of Rich- 
mond, in the summer of 1862, was McClellan's great object and aim ; 
and presumably it was Lincoln's. But Mr. Blair suggests that Mr. 
Lincoln was told " day by day " that McClellan was trying to " super- 
sede " him, and that this naturally made Mr. Lincoln hostile to Mc- 
Clellan. How lofty and comprehensive was the patriotism that could 
not bear to be " superseded " by a brilliant and crowning service to the 
country, if rendered by a general in the field? At this rate, Mr. Lin- 
coln must have gone on indefinitely selecting a series of incompetent 



98 MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 

The Cabinet council to which Mr. Blair alludes 
was held on the 5th of November. The order re- 
quiring- General McClellan to turn over the com- 
mand to General Burnside was dated on the same 
day. No reason for it was ever assigned by the 
President to General McClellan or to the country. 
In the absence, therefore, of any avowed reason, 
coming from Mr. Lincoln himself, we are remitted 
to the inquiry, what relation the Harrison's Land- 
ing letter may have borne to the determination of 
the President to recall McClellan after the battle of 
Antietam, and to reduce him to a condition of en- 
tire inactivity. We must ask the reader to turn 

commanders, because a competent one might become his political rival 
by succeeding in ending the war ! Two years after the Harrison's 
Landing letter was written, and two years after McClellan had been 
put into a position in which he could gain no more successes in the 
war, he was made by the Democratic party their candidate for the 
Presidency, although he had not succeeded in crushing the rebellion. 
But, as I have said in the text, what happened in 1864 does not throw 
much light on the state of Mr. Lincoln's feelings toward McClellan in 
1862, or upon the causes which may have produced them. 

Nothing is more natural than for Presidents to desire a re-election. 
But if it is to be understood that Mr, Lincoln, his leading friends and 
advisers, and his party generally, considered in 1862 that for political 
reasons it would not do to allow General McClellan to become too im- 
portant in the eyes of his countrymen, by reason of his success as a sol- 
dier in suppressing the rebellion, I do not know how there could be 
sent down to posterity a severer condemnation of them all than is in- 
volved in this excuse. Yet this excuse has not been suggested by me. 
I have only considered what has been suggested by others. If the 
excuse has any validity at all, it necessarily implies a great deal that is 
not creditable to those who took General McClellan from the service 
of the Union.] 



f 
TO THE REPUBLIC. 99 

back to the letter, in our first article, and to note 
that it proposed to Mr. Lincoln a certain policy in 
the prosecution of the war, to be adopted and fol- 
lowed out by him^ and from which, if any credit or 
benefit of a political nature was to accrue to any 
one, it would accrue to Mr. Lincoln. For it is not 
to be forgotten that this was a private letter. Its 
existence was not publicly known; and, if Mr. Lin- 
coln had shown it to any persons in Washington, 
they had kept the secret well among themselves. 
This remained the condition of things, as to the 
letter, until long after McClellan's removal from 
the command. Our readers have seen that one 
very striking feature of the policy which General 
McClellan suggested to Mr. Lincoln consisted in a 
mode in which the emancipation of slaves could be 
properly made to result from mihtary measures 
and operations. It was not the same plan that Mr. 
Lincoln suddenly adopted nearly three months 
after he received General McClellan's letter, and 
five days after General McClellan had gained the 
battle of Antietam. General McClellan's plan pro- 
posed that the Government should permanently 
appropriate slave-property to its own use, recog- 
nizing the right of the owner to compensation — a 
principle which he suggested " might be extended, 
upon grounds of military necessity and security, to 
all the slaves in a particular State, thus working 



100 MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 

manumission in such State." Mr. Lincoln's subse- 
quent plan attempted to abolish slavery by an Ex- 
ecutive decree, without recognizing any right to 
compensation. It is not necessary to consider here 
which of these two plans was the wisest, or the 
most practical. We are not dealing with the mer- 
its of either of them ; but we are dealing with the 
historical fact that, in the month of July, 1862, Gen- 
eral McClellan, in a private letter to Mr. Lincoln, 
proposed for his adoption a comprehensive policy 
in the prosecution of the war, one important part 
of which embraced a mode of effecting the extin- 
guishment of slavery as a legitimate measure of 
war. While General McClellan remained at Har- 
rison's Landing, and had as yet gained no striking 
successes excepting that he had saved the Army 
of the Potomac from destruction, after which he 
had been put into a kind of disgrace, his Harri- 
son's Landing letter, still an entirely private docu- 
ment in the hands of Mr. Lincoln, could not have 
been regarded as a matter for any political anx- 
iety. But when he had saved Washington from 
capture, and had defeated Lee at the battle of 
Antietam, if his letter, written three months pre- 
viously, was suddenly recalled to the recollection 
of Mr. Lincoln and those of his Cabinet who had 
seen it, they must have especially remembered 
his suggestion of a plan for the manumission of 



TO THE REPUBLIC. lOi 

slaves, as a measure of military operations and 
necessities. 

We now come, therefore, to a theory which has 
been suggested to account for the removal of Gen- 
eral McClellan from command after the battle of 
Antietam. This theory, when fully stated, is as 
follows: That, with this letter from General Mc- 
Clellan in his possession, Mr. Lincoln was per- 
suaded to beheve that, if the writer should succeed 
in destroying Lee's army, he would become a for- 
midable rival for the next Presidency ; that this 
letter would be McClellan's " platform " ; that his 
platform must therefore be anticipated by an Ex- 
ecutive proclamation that slavery was to be exter- 
minated by an Executive decree ; that circum- 
stances had compelled Mr. Lincoln, after Pope's 
defeat at the second Bull Run, to restore McClel- 
lan to command, and to permit him to free Mary- 
land from the presence of the enemy ; but that, 
when this had been done, it was politically neces- 
sary to prevent McClellan from becoming, by fur- 
ther successes, a competitor in the next Presiden- 
tial election, and a competitor who would be able 
to show a prior claim to the policy of emanci- 
pation. 

This theory derives some color from the fact 
that Mr. Lincoln suddenly changed his mind on the 
subject of emancipation. On the 13th of Septem- 



102 MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 

ber he told a deputation of clergymen from Chi- 
cago that an emancipation proclamation would be 
no more effective than " the Pope's bull against the 
comet " ; but on the 22d of September, after Mc- 
Clellan had gained the battle of Antietam, Mr. 
Lincoln issued a proclamation announcing that on 
the first of the succeeding January he should issue 
another abolishing slavery in every State that ad- 
hered to the rebellion. The theory or explanation 
of General McClellan's removal from the command 
of the army, at a moment when he was on the very 
eve of a great success, is that the Harrison's Land- 
ing letter was the moving cause. But, if this is a 
true explanation of General McClellan's removal, 
Mr. Lincoln made an enormous mistake in regard 
to the character and purpose of the Harrison's 
Landing letter, and the character and purpose of 
the writer. Through every line of that letter there 
breathes a manifest intention to present to Mr. Lin- 
coln's mind a comprehensive policy in the prosecu- 
tion of the war, which Mr. Lincoln was, if he should 
adopt it, to appropriate to himself ; which was to 
redound to Mr. Lincoln's benefit, so far as it could 
redound to the personal benefit of any one. There 
is not a word in the letter which can justify any 
one in believing that the writer was seeking to lay 
up political treasure for himself, in the archives ol 
the Government, or in Mr. Lincoln's private reposi- 



TO THE REPUBLIC. IO3 

tories. Among gentlemen, it is usually considered 
an act of meanness to claim afterward the author- 
ship of a paper which one has given to another who 
is in a high position of pubhc trust, for adoption 
as a measure of public policy ; and no man, who 
ever knew General McClellan, can believe that he 
deliberately planned to commit such an act of 
meanness. His letter was the letter of one gentle- 
man to another. The writer, it is true, was a gen- 
eral in the service of the Government ; the recipi- 
ent was the head of that Government. But the 
letter nevertheless was not an official letter ; it was 
a private letter, suggesting to Mr. Lincoln's *' pri- 
vate consideration " a certain line of policy for his 
adoption. Mr. Lincoln desired, w^hen in June he 
assented to General McClellan's proposal to submit 
to him his views respecting the whole conduct of 
the war, that care should be taken to preserve 
secrecy. Such care was taken. General McClellan 
wrote the letter with his own hand in his tent at 
Harrison's Landing, and placed it himself in the 
hands of Mr. Lincoln. Mr. Lincoln need not have 
shown it to a human being. He might have pro- 
pounded to his Cabinet the policy which it de- 
scribed, without saying that General McClellan 
had recommended it. Public men in such posi- 
tions have often received the most important sug- 
gestions from some one else, and have not deemed 



104 MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 

themselves bound to disclose their authorship. If 
Mr. Lincoln had proposed this policy for the con- 
sideration of his Cabinet, without saying that it had 
been suggested by General McClellan, there can be 
no doubt that it would have had a fair considera- 
tion, and possibly it might have been adopted. If 
it had been, there can be as little doubt that the 
world never would have known from General Mc- 
Clellan that the suggestion came from him ; while 
he would have been able to say that he concurred 
in what the President had determined on, and 
would do everything in his power as a general to 
carry it out. 

General McClellan may well have been aston- 
ished, therefore, as we know that he was, when he 
heard it said, long after his removal from the com- 
mand, that his private letter to Mr. Lincoln had 
caused the latter to regard him as having sought 
by means of it to set his sails for the popular 
breeze, and that out of his sails the wind had been 
taken by Mr. Lincoln's proclamation. If ever a man 
was intent upon anything that was unselfish, and 
devoid of any purpose but to serve his official su- 
perior, it was General McClellan when he sketched 
that great poHcy for Mr. Lincoln's private consid- 
eration. All that happened in the political world, 
two years afterward, when General McClellan, by 
no procurement of his own, was nominated as the 



TO THE REPUBLIC. 1 05 

Democratic candidate in the summer of 1864, has 
of course no relevancy to the cause or causes 
which operated upon Mr. Lincoln's mind in No- 
vember, 1862, to make him recall General McClel- 
lan from the command of the Army of the Poto- 
mac, and to bid him report at Trenton, in the State 
of New Jersey. 

Among the members of Mr. Lincoln's Cabinet 
in the summer and autumn of 1862, there were two 
persons who were as unfriendly to Mr. Lincoln as 
they were to General McClellan. Mr. Chase had 
reasons of his own for representing to Mr. Lincoln 
that the Democrats then had General McClellan in 
training as their future candidate for the Presi- 
dency, although it would have been difficult for 
him to show in what the training consisted. Any 
one who remembers the condition of Democratic 
sentiment on the subject of slavery and the proper 
objects of the war, at the time when General 
McClellan wrote his letter to Mr. Lincoln, and 
even down to a much later period, can easily see 
that the letter never was designed by the writer 
as a means of recommending himself to that party 
as their candidate for the Presidency. But Mr. 
Chase — to borrow an old parliamentary phrase — 
" took nothing ** for his own advantage by his 
efforts to undermine Mr. Lincoln's confidence in 
McClellan. He may be dismissed to the innumer- 



I06 MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 

able company of those who " filed their minds " 
and gained nothing by it for themselves. The 
one redeeming part of Mr. Chase's conduct toward 
McClellan is, that he never pretended to be any- 
thing but an enemy. But, in all that scene of in- 
fidelity to the military interests of the republic, 
there stands forth one central figure, prominent in 
double-dealing, celebrated for duplicity, the arch- 
hypocrite Stanton. The world does not now learn 
his amazing insincerity for the first time, or from 
us. Our proof of it is only cumulative. The char- 
acter to which that proof relates is one that no man 
can explain, one that no party and no faction can 
bear to defend. This man began at an early period 
to fawn upon McClellan. It is not improbable that 
the young General, in the frankness of his own na- 
ture, and in his readiness to accept all proffered 
aid in the great public duties which devolved upon 
him after he became general-in-chief by the advice 
of General Scott, may have believed in the per- 
sonal devotion and attachment which this eminent 
Pennsylvania lawyer professed to himself, to his 
relatives, and to his friends in the army. But, 
there was at first a jarring string in these strains of 
flattery. The part was overacted, and the actor 
did not, until he was warned, perceive where- 
in he " o'erstepped the modesty of nature." He 
thought to recommend himself to McClellan by 



TO THE REPUBLIC. \qj 

the grossest ridicule and abuse of Lincoln. He 
found that McClellan's sense of propriety did not 
approve this coarse disparagement of his official 
superior. But, as Mr. Stanton was known to be a 
man of high ability and distinction in his profes- 
sion, and as Mr. Lincoln was disposed to believe 
that he would be a valuable Secretary of War, 
both because of his energy and because of his 
avowed friendship for McClellan, the latter, when 
consulted, gave his influence with the President for 
the introduction of Mr. Stanton into the Cabinet. 

There is a saying — '' something musty " — about 
the displacement of ladders after an elevation has 
been reached. As time went on, as Mr. Stanton's 
ambition grew, and '' his infant fortune came to 
age " with the increase of his power, he came to 
know how necessary McClellan was to Mr. Lincoln, 
and how important to the country it was that the 
best relations should exist between them. Know- 
ing this, he determined that McClellan should be 
ruined. For Lincoln he had so much contempt 
that he thought he could be trusted to ruin himself. 
Yet to the last hour of his intercourse with Mc- 
Clellan, and down to the final consummation of his 
purpose, Mr. Stanton professed to McClellan and 
his friends an unalterable fidelity, and an unchange- 
able conviction of his importance to the public in- 
terests : while, at the very same time, the occasion* 



I08 MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 

al ebullitions of his hostility, bursting forth from 
his arrogant temper, in the presence of others, and 
his official acts, betrayed the object to which his 
hatred was carrying him, long before it was finally 
attained. The army saw it, if the people of the 
Union did not. McClellan was to be destroyed by 
making Lincoln distrust him. The scheme suc- 
ceeded — the deed was done. But what of the chief 
conspirator ? 

Dante, as he walks through the infernal realms, 
protected by the great Mantuan Spirit " whose 
fame still lasts in the world, and will last as long as 
time," tells us of the common herd, undistinguish- 
able from one another, who are grouped in eternal 
suffering according to the nature of their besetting 
sin. These are they who are damned by classifica- 
tion. We do not learn their names or nations. We 
only see them, in crowds, in a situation of dread- 
ful appropriateness to their peculiar transgression. 
But, when the poet encounters one of those histori- 
cal personages on whom, because of the conse- 
quences which his acts have entailed upon his 
country or mankind, there should be fastened all 
the infamy that is his due, we have the individual 
and his history touched by the master's stroke, and 
the sufferer stands for ever alone in the awful 
characterization of his fate. One of these ghastly 
objects of retribution is that Bertran de Born who 



TO THE REPUBLIC. 109 

"gave the evil counsels " which separated those who 
should have been united. The spectacle of this 
false counselor to a prince, which the poet describes, 
is too horrible to be transferred in detail to these 
pages. But, if any one is disposed to wonder that 
this image has risen up before us as we write of a 
passage in our national annals, let him count, if he 
can, the soldiers' graves, the widows* and the 
orphans' tears, the treasure needlessly squandered, 
the war needlessly prolonged, the whole vast sum 
of misery and sorrow which must be charged to 
the malice that one man bore to another. And, 
when he sickens in the contemplation of these ac- 
cumulated woes, let him turn to the so-called his- 
torical literature of the country, and note how, 
from the same source, it has been poisoned with 
lies. We must thread this dreary maze of Stan- 
ton's treachery and Lincoln's weakness, until we 
have reached conclusions on which it is fit that a 
final judgment should rest.* 

* An illustration of Mr. Stanton's character comes to us while we 
write. On the 3d of April, 1862, General Franklin received an order 
to embark his division for the Peninsula, to be under the command of 
General McClellan in the advance upon Richmond. Calling at the 
War Department on that evening, General Franklin met General Mc- 
Dowell. The following account is taken from the "Philadelphia 
Times " of April 28, 1877, in the words of General Franklin : " General 
McDowell informed me that the Secretary of War had told him about 
an hour before that General McClellan intended to work by strategy and 
not by fighting, and that he should not have another man from his 



no MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 

It seems to us most remarkable, in all this con- 
catenation of conspiracies against the usefulness 

Department ; that all of the enemies of the Administration centered 
around him ; and the Secretary accused him of having political am- 
bition. Also, that he had not left the number of troops to defend 
Washington that the President required ; in other words, that he had 
disobeyed the President's orders. General McDowell remonstrated 
against the step which was about to be taken, arguing that, if General 
McClellan had political aspirations, they would be forwarded by the 
very course which the Administration was taking in this case. He used 
all the arguments which he could bring to bear, to convince the Secre- 
tary that he was making a mistake in ordering the detachment of his 
corps. The result was, General McDowell's corps was detached from 
the Army of the Potomac, and was marched to Catlett's Station on the 
Orange and Alexandria Railroad, where it could do no possible good. 
General McClellan's plan of turning Yorktown, by the movement of 
McDowell's corps on the north bank of the York River, was utterly 
destroyed. The Army of the Potomac was forced to stay a whole 
month on the Peninsula uselessly, and the capture of Richmond, which 
in all human probability would have been made in the month of May, 
had General McClellan's plan been carried out, was deferred for three 
years." 

General Franklin now writes to us as follows, inclosing a copy of 
his paper in the " Philadelphia Times " : " On the evening of the ar- 
rival of General McDowell's corps at Catlett's Station (about April 8th 
or 9th), my division, which then formed part of the corps, was ordered 
to join General McClellan by way of Alexandria. While it was march- 
ing to Alexandria 1 went to the Peninsula, saw and conferred with the 
General [McClellan], and returned to Alexandria to embark the divis- 
ion on the transports. When I was ready to start, I was informed that 
the President and Secretary of War wished to see me. I first saw Mr. 
Stanton. He was very cordial, was glad I was going to the Peninsula, 
would at once determine a question of my rank which was before him. 
He desired me to give his love to McClellan, and to say to him that he 
had his best wishes for his success, and that any help to him which he 
required that his Department could furnish would be most cheerfully 
accorded. In fact, nothing could have been more satisfactory to any 
friend of McClellan than this interview would have been to me, had 
not the recollection of McDowell's interview with Stanton of April 3d 



TO THE REPUBLIC, HI 

and success of a military man who was serving 
the country with singleness of purpose and with 
no ambition but to do his military duty, that Mr. 
Lincoln, with his imputed shrewdness, did not see 
to the very bottom of the hearts of men who 
wished to put enmity between him and this faith- 
ful soldier. Mr. Lincoln should have had the wis- 



been fresh in my mind. I never saw Stanton after this interview. 
The interview with the President amounted to nothing." 

We do not know where, in the history of any country, there is any- 
thing so grotesque as the fact that the destinies of a great war were to 
a large extent in the hands of a mere lawyer who, apart from his pro- 
pensity to resort to duplicity when there was no need for it whatever, 
was completely destitute of all military knowledge or judgment. Such 
administrative faculty as Mr. Stanton had was due to the energy of an 
imperious will. President Buchanan, who gauged Mr. Stanton accu- 
rately when he was his Attorney-General, has left the following brief 
description of him, which now lies before us in Mr. Buchanan's hand- 
writing : 

" Mr. Stanton was an able, astute, and somewhat overbearing, dog- 
matic lawyer. He had been eminently and deservedly successful at the 
bar. His personal integrity has never been doubted. He was, how- 
ever, deficient in the knowledge of a statesman ; but he performed his 
duties as Attorney-General in a respectable and satisfactory manner. 
He had not the calmness and sober judgment that would have fitted 
him for an important administrative office. He was rash and impetu- 
ous. It was his nature to act from the impulse of the moment, and he 
did not stop to inquire into the remote consequences of his decision." 
This was evidently written before Mr. Stanton became Mr. Lincoln's 
Secretary of War. What it says of his personal integrity relates to all 
matters of money. In that respect Mr. Stanton's character was with- 
out a stain. His personal duplicity, toward those who tiiisted him and 
whom he professed to serve,' is an enigma which those who knew him 
best never could understand. He was as false to Buchanan as he was 
to others, and it is to be hoped that Mr. Buchanan died without know- 
ing that he was so. 



112 MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE " 

dom to remember that the Harrison's Landing let- 
ter, instead of affording even a pohtical reason 
for depriving the country of General McClellan's 
mihtary services, was entirely under his (Mr. Lin- 
coln's) own control ; for General McClellan had 
not divulged its contents, and as a man of honor 
he could never have divulged them for any pur- 
pose but to shield himself from an unjust impu- 
tation. After it had been imputed to him that he 
wrote the letter for a selfish political purpose, he 
included a copy of it in his report, that the whole 
world might judge of its character. A portion of 
his countrymen, knowing little of the facts, and 
paying but little heed to the character of the let- 
ter, have permitted an unjust impression to remain 
in their minds. It is time for them to correct their 
impressions, and to observe that, if Mr. Lincoln 
had looked into the letter, when McClellan's ene- 
mies were perpetually trying to awaken his jeal- 
ousy, he must have seen that, whatever else it was, 
it was no " platform " for a Democratic politician 
to put himself upon in the summer of 1862. But, 
according to the theory on which we are com- 
menting, Mr. Lincoln, although he had it entirely 
in his power, in the autumn of 1862, to recognize 
the true character of that letter as a private sug- 
gestion of a policy to be adopted by him and made 
his own if he should think well of it, could not, 



TO THE REPUBLIC, II3 

nevertheless, resist the representations of McClel- 
lan's enemies that it was designed for a very differ- 
ent purpose. No man can read that letter now, 
whether he knows General McClellan or not, and 
find in it any trace of the design that was imputed 
to him. No man who knows General McClellan, 
and knows the political history of the time when 
the letter was written, can believe that he ever had 
such a design,* 

On the night of the same day on which the 
removal of General McClellan was considered in 
the Cabinet, the elder Mr. Blair, as the reader has 
seen, visited Mr. Lincoln, and patriotically endeav- 
ored to dissuade him from that step. At the meet- 
ing of the Cabinet on the 5th Mr. Lincoln made 

* It must be remembered that the letter was written in July, 
1862. One copy of it remained in manuscript in General McClel- 
lan's possession. In August, 1863, General McClellan transmitted 
to the War Department his report on the military operations in 
which he had been engaged. The report remained in the Adjutant- 
General's office until it was sent into Congress at its next session, 
which commenced in December, 1863. It contained a correct copy 
of the Harrison's Landing letter. Soon after the report began to be 
printed by the printer of public documents, the newspaper press began 
to comment upon and to copy from it. An imperfect copy of the let- 
ter appeared in a New York paper in January, 1864 ; but how it was 
obtained is not known. An edition of General McClellan's report was 
published by Sheldon & Co., at New York, in the spring of 1864 ; 
and from that edition the public obtained the first authentic copy of 
the Harrison's Landing letter that was ever authorized by General 
McClellan. He was removed from command and sent into retirement 
in November, 1862. In the early part of November, 1864, he resigned 
from the army. 



114 MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 

no allusion to the Harrison's Landing letter, for 
some of the gentlemen present did not know of its 
existence. The discussion in the Cabinet turned 
wholly on General McClellan's activity as a com- 
mander, and his alleged misrepresentation of the 
actual condition of his army in respect to sup- 
plies, after the battle of Antietam. When Mr. 
Blair saw the President on that evening, the lat- 
ter remarked that he had said he would remove 
McClellan if he allowed Lee's army to get away 
from him, and that he must remove him. When 
Mr. Blair saw Mr. Lincoln on the next day, Mr. 
Lincoln said, ** Mr. Blair, I was obliged to play 
shut pan to you last night." The order for the 
change in the command had then come out, and 
Mr. Lincoln felt obliged to account to Mr. Blair 
for not having told him on the previous evening 
that the matter had been decided. The question 
arises, therefore, To whom had the President said 
that he would remove McClellan if he allowed 
Lee's army to get away from him ? Certainly he 
never said so to General McClellan himself. On 
the field of Antietam, twelve days after Lee's 
army had recrossed the Potomac, Mr. Lincoln told 
General McClellan that he did not intend to dis- 
place him, and that he was not to move on the 
enemy until he felt that he was entirely ready. 
On the 6th of October the President ordered him 



TO THE REPUBLIC, I15 

to pursue Lee ; but on the 21st the President knew 
that it was at least doubtful whether he was in a 
condition to do so, and a little later the President 
learned that he certainly was not. If we go for- 
ward to the 5th of November, after McClellan, 
properly supplied, had placed his army in the best 
possible positions for dividing Lee's forces and 
beating them in detail, we find the Cabinet coun- 
cil sitting at the White House debating the ques- 
tion of his removal from command. At that meet- 
ing the old story of unnecessary delay after the 
battle of Antietam was again trumped up, and, 
notwithstanding the information that had been ob- 
tained by Colonel Scott and communicated to the 
President, the Secretary of War, and General Hal- 
leck, which made it certain that the delay had been 
wholly due to the want of indispensable supplies, 
at least one member of the Cabinet, who had been 
a steadfast supporter of General McClellan upon 
public grounds, was made to admit, on General 
Halleck's " statements," that there had been un- 
necessary delay after the battle of Antietam. We 
do not know how to characterize that scene at the 
President's council-table. We were about to use 
a word which we withhold. We can only point to 
the fact that, at the very moment of that discus- 
sion on the proposal to remove General McClellan 
from command, his headquarters were at Rector- 



Il6 MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 

town ; his army, in admirable discipline and spirit, 
was disposed in position for successive attacks 
upon Lee's divided troops ; and it was yet an un- 
decided question whether Lee was to escape, while 
the chances were entirely against him. For Gen- 
eral Lee, however, that question was decided by 
the change in the Federal command — a change 
that was made upon a pretext which more than 
one person around that council-board knew to be 
false. 

Involved as Mr. Lincoln was in the toils laid for 
him by Chase, Stanton, and Halleck, we do not be- 
lieve that he had it in his power to assign publicly 
a reason for removing McClellan. The subject of 
McClellan's allowing Lee's army to escape was not 
discussed in the Cabinet. On the evening of the 
day on which that discussion took place, Mr. Lin- 
coln had to say something to the elder Mr. Blair, 
and he went back to an old promise which he had 
given to somebody, that he would remove Mc- 
Clellan if he allowed Lee's army to get away from 
him. But at that moment McClellan was about to 
attack Longstreet, and the result, which had not 
occurred, could not have been the reason why 
Mr. Lincoln had already allowed the order to 
be issued. At the Cabinet meeting, the reason 
urged was a delay that had occurred on the field 
of Antietam during the three weeks that ended on 



TO THE REPUBLIC. II7 

the last days of October. After the Cabinet coun- 
cil broke up, there must have been a private con- 
ference between Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Chase and 
Mr. Stanton, during which Mr. Lincoln consented 
that the order should be issued, and that the name 
of General Burnside should be inserted in it as the 
successor of McClellan. But, if Mr. Lincoln had 
ever been asked thereafter to assign the reason 
why he allowed that order to be issued, we are 
entirely unable to see what he could have said. 
But, valuing McClellan highly, as we beheve he 
did, and knowing as he did that McClellan was at 
that moment pursuing Lee's army by his orders, 
Mr. Lincoln was so entrapped by McClellan's ene- 
mies that he could not extricate himself without 
sacrificing McClellan ; for he knew that Halleck's 
'' statements," made and listened to at the Coun- 
cil-board, could be made elsewhere, and would be 
made to the public if he allowed McClellan to 
remain at the head of the army. This would have 
produced a public issue respecting the mode in 
which affairs had been managed by the War De- 
partment, in meeting or failing to meet General 
McClellan's requisitions during the month of Oc- 
tober. 

There is another theory, less common than the 
one which we have thus far considered, by which 
some persons think that General McClellan's re- 



1 1 8 MCCLELLAN 'S LAST SER VICE 

moval from command is to be accounted for. This 
theory is entertained by officers of the army, who, 
while abstaining habitually from all party or politi- 
cal relations, were deeply interested in observing 
the course of the Administration in the prosecu- 
tion of the war. It is this : That in the summer 
and autumn of 1862, after the defeat of Pope, fol- 
lowed by McClellan's expulsion of the Confederate 
troops from Maryland, the President's advisers, 
who were represented by Mr. Chase and Mr. Stan- 
ton, did not desire further military successes in the 
war until they should have made it a war for the 
extermination of slavery. In support of this theory 
those who entertain it point to the following facts : 
That if McClellan had captured Richmond in 
November or December, 1862, the proclamation 
would have remained, as what Mr. Lincoln de- 
scribed it, a " bull against the comet " ; because, if 
the rebellion had been crushed then and there, the 
Constitution, notwithstanding the proclamation, 
must have remained what it always had been ; that, 
after McClellan, came Burnside and Hooker, who 
were not more effectually sustained and supported 
by the Administration than McClellan had been ; 
and that when it was determined to remove Mc- 
Clellan, so that Richmond might not fall prema- 
turely, it was a sort of hap-hazard choice that at 
the last moment of deliberation made Burnside his 



TO THE REPUBLIC. H^ 

immediate successor. This is not a theory which 
has been the result of an afterthought. There were 
intelligent and observing officers of that army who 
knew that McClellan, on the one hand, was strain- 
ing every nerve to overtake and defeat the Confed- 
erate forces at the moment when he was displaced, 
and who, on the other hand, believed, at that time, 
that he was not permitted to succeed because the 
Administration did not then desire success. It is 
impossible, of course, to penetrate into the secret 
counsels of those who then controlled the course of 
the war. What we can see, however, is that the 
removal of General McClellan entailed the frightful 
slaughter at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, 
and the Confederate invasion of Pennsylvania. In 
our last paper we presented to our readers an ac- 
curate sketch, from which they could learn with 
what excellent strategy McClellan was operating, 
to insure the fall of Richmond with the least ex- 
penditure of precious lives. We doubt if one 
reader out of every hundred has ever before under- 
stood how the severance of the communications 
between the two parts of Lee's army, and the forc- 
ing of Longstreet back upon Gordonsville — results 
that were within McClellan's grasp on the 7th of 
November, 1862 — would have opened to him an al- 
most unopposed march upon Richmond. Yet this 
commander, thus arrested by his own Government 



120 MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 

when he was about to achieve a great success — ar- 
rested from a motive of statecraft, or from a motive 
of personal jealousy, or from a combination of both 
— is the man whose reputation has been slurred be- 
cause he did not sacrifice his men by hecatombs, 
from which nothing could be gained, but sought 
to attain his object by occupying positions that 
would make a battle and a victory worth what 
they might cost.* 

* At Warrenton, after the soldiers had learned that McClellan was 
to leave them, as he rode through the ranks that lined the road for 
miles, the men called out to him repeatedly, " Come back, Little 
Mac ! " McClellan turned to an officer who rode by his side, and, with 
tears gathering in his eyes, asked, " What do you think of all this ? " 
" It is hard upon you, but best for us." - " Why ? " " Because you are 
not permitted to succeed, and, as the people in Washington do not in- 
tend that we shall fight at present, we shall be saved defeat and morti- 
fication. You will come back when you are wanted." Laying his 
hand on the officer's shoulder, the General asked, " How did you learn 
so much ? " Our informant adds that he did not think at the time how 
soon he was to witness Fredericksburg. 

A very fair writer on the " Campaigns of the Army of the Potomac " 
(Swinton, New York, 1866) was at a loss to understand why Burnside 
abandoned at Warrenton all of McClellan's plans, and, turning his 
back on Lee's army, marched his own army to Fredericksburg. He 
says that this project, although not approved at Washington, was as- 
sented to ; that is to say, the Administration abandoned the pursuit of 
Lee's army, and allowed their own army to be transferred to Freder- 
icksburg, without one effort to carry out McClellan's plan of operations. 
This could have been done only for the purpose of obtaining a new 
base, where the Army of the Potomac could remain inactive until the 
spring. But the swift pursuit of Lee, whose whole forces arrived on 
the south bank of the Rappahannock, for the relief of Fredericksburg, 
within a week after Bumside's army had reached the river, discon- 
certed the whole project of '* winter quarters" at Fredericksburg, and 
ended in conflicts which produced what Mr. Swinton justly calls " a 



TO THE REPUBLIC. 12 1 

In reference to the political motives by which 
Mr. Lincoln is supposed to have been influenced, 
we have considered all the theories that have ever 
been suggested. Whatever theory of political mo- 
tive is the one that ought to be adopted, the de- 
plorable fact remains that the country lost the serv- 
ices of General McClellan, and that great disasters 
ensued. At Fredericksburg, in December, 1862, 
under Burnside, the Federal losses, in killed, 
wounded, and missing, were 12,321. At Chan- 
cellorsville, under Hooker, in May, 1863, the killed 
and wounded were 11,033. These losses were en- 
tirely uncompensated by any advantage or prestige. 
In June the Confederates invaded Pennsylvania, 
and were barely checked at Gettysburg. Remem- 
bering these consequences, we are forced also to 
remember that, if anything in * war can be pro- 
nounced to have been so highly probable as to 
amount to a moral certainty, it is that, if McClellan 
had been allowed to fight Lee again, there would 
have been another victory, which would have in- 
sured the capture of Richmond before the end of 

slaughter the most bloody and the most useless of the war." While 
General Burnside must be considered to have been excessively rash in 
attempting to carry Lee's positions by assault, it should be remem- 
bered that he was at Fredericksburg at all by the assent of the Govern- 
ment. The motive which led to the assent is believed, by many officers 
of high intelligence, to have been a secret determination to let the 
war in Virginia stand still until the effect of the emancipation procla- 
mation had been fully developed. 



122 MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 

the year 1862. The blood with which the Wilder- 
ness was afterward watered would have been 
saved. 

We shall now close our review of this part of 
General McClellan's military career with a sum- 
mary, which may assist our readers in forming an 
opinion of the justice of a criticism which has long 
been used to excuse the conduct of the Administra- 
tion. The criticism has most commonly been put 
in this form : that while General McClellan had 
great accomplishments as an organizer of armies 
and as an engineer, yet as a general at the head of 
troops he lacked decision, promptness, and vigor, 
from a constitutional infirmity which made him re- 
luctant to strike a blow until he had accumulated 
every possible advantage for delivering it. The 
soundness of this criticism — supposing it to be 
honestly made — may be tested by the history of 
the period over which we have passed in these 
papers. We have followed General McClellan for 
the space of a little less than five months, from the 
26th of June to the 7th of November, 1862. The 
week extending from the 26th of June to the 4th of 
July, in which there was more severe fighting than 
any one of our armies in an equal period ever en- 
countered, ended in the rescue of the Army of the 
Potomac from an extraordinary peril, into which it 
was brought by the blundering folly of its own 



TO THE REPUBLIC. 123 

Government. No competent critic will deny that 
the tactics, the force of will, the indomitable perse- 
verance, and the admirable judgment displayed by 
McClellan during the seven days* march to the 
James, evinced the highest attributes of a military 
commander; for no such critic will question that 
to rescue an army, on such a march, from the 
clutches of a superior force, is as great an achieve- 
ment as to fight and win a pitched battle with 
equal or nearly equal numbers on the two sides. 
From the 4th of July to the 5th of August, a period 
of comparative inactivity on the James necessarily 
followed, in consequence of the indecision of the 
Government as to what was to be done. From the 
5th of August to the i6th, McClellan could do 
nothing but execute the orders of his superiors to 
remove his army to the front of Washington. 
From the i6th of August to the 27th, he was en- 
gaged in transferring the different bodies of his 
army to the command of General Pope. From the 
27th of August until the morning of the 2d of Sep- 
tember, he was without the command of more than 
a hundred men. 

Into the next two weeks following the 2d of 
September, when called upon to save the capital, 
he crowded an amount of energy, skill, prompt- 
ness, and vigor, which should alone have made 
a great reputation, if he had never done anything 



124 MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 

else. If we break up those two weeks into their 
important subdivisions, we have, first, the five 
days which followed his resumption of command, 
when he took a defeated and demoralized army 
that was swarming toward the capital in the night, 
immediately restored its discipline, posted it with- 
in the defenses of the city, reconstructed some of 
its organizations, and then threw it forward on a 
march to intercept an enemy flushed with his re- 
cent victory and preparing to come down upon the 
Maryland side of the Potomac. During the week 
that intervened between the 7th and the 13th of 
September, McClellan was moving his columns on 
five parallel routes, so that he might encounter Lee 
before the latter could descend upon Washington 
by an unoccupied and unguarded road, either next 
to or away from the river. In one week this 
march was accomplished, notwithstanding the cau- 
tions with which it had to be made. On the 13th, 
Lee's plans were revealed ; and it affords abundant 
proof of the sound judgment with which McClellan 
had conducted his march, and of the spirit and effi- 
ciency which he had restored to the troops, that 
the very first blow which he struck sent the whole 
Confederate army into retreat. The blow that was 
given at South Mountain was dealt on the twelfth 
day after McClellan resumed the command, and on 
the next day after that on which Lee's position be- 



TO THE REPUBLIC. 1 25 

came known ; and on the same day General Frank- 
lin, one of McClellan's most energetic lieutenants, 
attacked and carried the pass called Crampton's 
Gap, on the left, while the main body of McClel- 
lan's troops attacked the Confederates at South 
Mountain. In three days after South Mountain, 
the Confederate army was overtaken on the field of 
Antietam, and on the night of the fourth day its 
shattered forces were withdrawn into Virginia, 
after a desperately fought battle which lasted for 
fourteen hours. 

Carping criticism, imputations of "slowness," 
charges of hesitation and want of vigor, vanish into 
the realm of nonsense, in the face of such achieve- 
ments. When we look back upon what was ac- 
complished in the two weeks that followed McClel- 
lan's restoration to command, with an army which 
he took off the hands of a general under whom it 
had been shockingly beaten, and when we remem- 
ber that McClellan, as he marched out of Washing- 
ton, left behind him in high authority many offi- 
cials who wished him anything but success, we can 
only wonder at the easy credulity of that portion 
of the contemporary public who supposed him to 
be either slow or inefficient as a commander. The 
false impressions which one age derives from its 
own prejudices, that have been industriously culti- 
vated for the transient policies of political or per- 



126 MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 

sonal hostility, are a poor guide to the estimation 
in which a man is to be held in history. Beyond 
the range of their influence, even to-day, the mili- 
tary reputation of General McClellan among the 
best European judges is so high that it has often 
been said that he would have terminated the war 
in November or December, 1862, if he had been 
kept in the field and been supported and supplied 
as other generals subsequently were. We have 
heard, from a source that left us no reason to doubt 
the authenticity of the anecdote, that General von 
Moltke once expressed this opinion to an American 
who in conversation gave him to understand that 
" some of us in America do not estimate McClellan 
so highly as we do some others of our generals.** 
'^ It may be so," said the great Prussian command- 
er, " but let me tell you that, if your Government 
had supported General McClellan in the field as 
they should have done, your war would have been 
ended two years sooner than it was." 

But it is not necessary to look abroad in order 
to measure what we lost by the removal of Mc- 
Clellan from the public service. The history of the 
war in Virginia, after Antietam and after the re- 
moval of McClellan from command, is a history of 
the endeavor of our Government to re-establish the 
Union armies in the position before Richmond 
which they had occupied in June, 1862, when the 



TO THE REPUBLIC, 12/ 

Government withdrew from McClellan its prom- 
ised support, and left him to save his army by the 
flank movement to the James. That subsequent 
history embraces the battles of Fredericksburg, 
Chancellorsville, the Wilderness, and other fierce 
fights along the- bloody overland route from Wash- 
ington to Richmond. With these before him, the 
reader is compelled to ask himself whether, after 
Antietam, there was any battle fought between 
those two cities in which the Confederates were 
beaten and driven from the field ; and why the 
patriotic North was called upon for a lavish ex- 
penditure of treasure and of men to supply the 
places of the countless dead who fell in the effort 
to regain that old position before tli^e capital of 
Virginia. The enemy fell back before the over- 
whelming forces of the inexhaustible Union. In 
1865 they were utterly crushed and subdued, on the 
same ground from which, in 1862, the Army of the 
Potomac was withdrawn, in disregard of the ear- 
nest appeals of its commander, who did not cease 
to reiterate the memorable words of his dispatch to 
General Halleck, of August 4, 1862 : " Here is the 
true defense of Washington ; it is here, on the 
banks of the James, that the fate of the Union is to 
be decided." 

Yet it was not for the glory snatched from Mc- 
Clellan that we have ever grieved. All talent, 



128 MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE 

power, accomplishment, knowledge, experience, 
skill, and valor of the soldier form, when rightly 
regarded, a trust for his country ; and we are sure 
that General McClellan never has regretted and 
never can regret that he so regarded and used the 
gifts which it pleased Heaven to bestow upon him. 
Among all the distinguished military men of this 
or any other age, of whom the world knows so 
much as it knows of McClellan, there has been no 
man whose ambition was so perfectly unalloyed by 
the base element of self-seeking at the expense of 
others, and no man who has suffered so much in- 
justice from official superiors. Yet that injustice 
has not caused him to challenge his detractors up- 
on the issues that were made against him. Not at 
the time when that injustice was committed, not in 
the long period of eighteen years that has since 
elapsed, has he broken the reticence which is a part 
of his nature when his own public conduct or that 
of others is in question. That he will at some time 
break this silence, so far as to relate facts which he 
alone can tell, at least for those who are to come 
after us, his contemporaries should, as we believe 
they do, earnestly desire.* 

* [As no official explanation was ever given by the Executive for the 
removal of General McClellan from the command of the Army of the 
Potomac after the battle of Antietam, one is obliged to discuss the un- 
official and conjectural explanations and theories which have been sup- 
posed to account for it. After it was done, a committee of Congress 



TO THE REPUBLIC. 129 

was used as a means for producing throughout the loyal North a con- 
viction that it was done because General McClellan was incompetent. 
This was the famous " Committee on the Conduct of the War " : a 
body which, in addition to all the other mischief that it did, con- 
trived to produce and disseminate a monstrous amount of falsehood 
for the enlightenment of the people. This joint-committee of the two 
Houses of Congress, consisting of three members of the Senate and 
four members of the House, was appointed in December, 1861, while 
General McClellan was organizing the Army of the Potomac, and plan- 
ning the military operations that were to be undertaken throughout the 
southern, western, and southwestern regions of the country. The 
committee were " to inquire into the conduct of the present war." 
They sat from the time of their appointment until April 3, 1863, a 
period of eighteen months, and, at the end of that time, Mr. Benjamin 
F. Wade, a Senator from Ohio, Chairman of the Committee, presented 
their Report to the Senate. The Report began with the statement 
that the Committee "could perceive no necessity for recommending 
any particular legislation to Congress." They were of opinion that at 
each succeeding session of Congress since July, 1861, all the need- 
ful legislation, required to meet the exigencies of the war, had been 
enacted from time to time. This naive declaration rendered it certain 
that the Committee was not raised for any legislative purpose. For 
what, then, was it instituted ? To answer this question one must ascer- 
tain what they did. The Report, the journal of the Committee, and the 
testimony taken, show that they occupied themselves, through eighteen 
months, in interferences with the Executive duties, in examining 
officers of the army about different battles and the conduct of cam- 
paigns, and occasionally taking the testimony of other officials on these 
subjects. The Committee certainly rendered no aid to the Executive 
in " the conduct of the war" ; and it is one of the singular proofs of 
the confusion of functions then prevailing, that this intermeddling with 
Executive duties by a committee of Congress was tolerated. But 
while this Committee had no ostensible object that could be justified, 
it became a machine that could be turned to political uses. The 
animus of their Report toward General McClellan is apparent through- 
out. They made a document which, when printed and circulated 
under the authority of Congress, Avould be useful in justifying his re- 
moval from command after the battle of Antietam, although they could 
not, any more than the Executive, assign an official reason for displac- 
ing him, or an unofficial reason that would be consistent with justice, 



130 MCCLELLAN'S LAST SERVICE. 

truth, or public policy. Annoying as the doings of this Committee 
must have been to the Executive, while they v^^ere going on, their Re- 
port was so shaped that it became serviceable in giving to an excuse 
for the removal of McClellan the appearance of a solemn finding of 
important facts by a Congressional Committee. Thus, after having 
reviewed General McClellan's Peninsula campaign in a very unfair 
way, upon testimony taken and arranged to suit themselves, the Re- 
port proceeded to say : 

" Your Committee having gone so fully into the details of the Pen- 
insula campaign, do not deem it necessary to devote so much space to 
the campaign in Maiyland. The same mind that controlled the move- 
ments upon the Peninsula controlled those in Maryland, and the same 
general features characterize the one campaign that characterized the 
other. In each may be seen the same unreadiness to move promptly 
and act vigorously ; the same desire for more troops before advancing ; 
and the same references to the great superiority of numbers on the part 
of the enemy. Your Committee, therefore, content themselves with re- 
ferring briefly to the leading operations of the campaign." 

Will any reader now believe that this Report, pretending to refer 
to the leading operations of the Maryland campaign, said not one word 
about the battle of Antietam ! Incredible as it may seem, such is the 
fact. 

The conclusions of this Committee respecting General McClellan's 
characteristics as a commander could be reached only by suppressing 
some, or by omitting to gather all, of the facts ; and, accordingly, the 
Report, the journal, and the evidence, in reference to either of Mc- 
Clellan's campaigns, are utterly unreliable as sources of history, now 
or hereafter. But as a political document, intended for a political pur- 
pose, they were efficient. Fifteen thousand copies of the Report and 
the testimony were printed and circulated. No one need be surprised, 
therefore, at the amount of prejudice and ignorance concerning Gen- 
eral McClellan that has been transmitted from that day to this.] 



A TRIBUTE TO McCLELLAN. 

Although but measurably recovered from the 
shock which, in common with many thousands 
throughout the country, I suffered when the sud- 
den death of General McClellan was announced, 
I can not longer delay my tribute to his memory. 
All of the very remarkable persons whom I have 
known and lost in the course of my life were much 
older than myself. In our earlier years the death 
of men who were our elders, however distinguished 
or important they may have been, seems in the 
natural course of things. It does not affect us with 
that sinking of the heart which we feel when, later 
in life, we are called to mourn one who was much 
younger than ourselves, and who we fondly hoped 
would be among the few mourners at our own de- 
parture. In McClellan, I have lost all that the 
country has lost and more ; for he was not only a 
public man of great distinction and rare character, 
but he was to me, as to very many others, a most 
dear friend, whose presence was a benediction, in 



132 A TRIBUTE TO MCCLELLAN. 

whose society there was perpetual enjoyment of 
the highest nature, and whose death has made a 
void that can not be filled. As one stands over the 
grave of such a man, and exclaims, with Milton 
mourning for Lycidas, 



He hath not left his 



peer, 



it matters not whether others think that he had 
peers or superiors. What he was to us is all that 
we can think of^of the one irreparable loss that 
afflicts us as no other ever has. 

I first saw him soon after he had graduated 
from West Point and had received his commission 
as second lieutenant in the Corps of Engineers. 
This was in the year 1846. At this time he came 
to Boston, where I then resided, to attend the wed- 
ding of his elder brother. Dr. McClellan of Phila- 
delphia, who married into a Boston family with 
which I was distantly connected. The young lieu- 
tenant was a bright, round, alert youth, a little 
under the ordinary height, with a highly intelli- 
gent expression of countenance and a quick eye. 
He was perfectly simple in his manners, although 
entirely self-possessed, and in every inch a gentle- 
man. As I remember him at this distance of nine- 
and-thirty years, he was, as in his later life, quite a 
muscular person, his frame giving promise of that 
power of activity and endurance for which he was 



A TRIBUTE TO MCCLELLAN. 133 

afterward noted. His well-developed head was 
set, by a short neck, above broad shoulders, and 
firmness and character were about his mouth, tem- 
pered by a sweet smile. I do not think I deceive 
myself when I recollect him as having, even at that 
early age, much of the same winning attractiveness 
which so many have felt in his riper years. Young 
men who are just fledged from college or other 
public institution of learning are not always very 
interesting persons. McClellan at twenty was the 
most interesting young fellow of his age that I ever 
met, and I imagine that as a mere boy he must 
have been a very manly person, without a particle 
of what is often offensive in boys who affect manli- 
ness. There never could have been any sort of af- 
fectation in him at any time. He did not need the 
attrition of the world to take out of him any native 
or acquired nonsense, for his nature was the most 
genuine and the freest from anything like conceit 
that could be imagined. 

I never saw him again until his name was in all 
men's mouths, for praise or for detraction, long, 
long years afterward. I had heard of him, indeed, 
as a gallant young officer in the Mexican War, who 
had greatly distinguished himself in whatever he 
had to do. I was aware that he had afterward 
been sent abroad, during the administration of 
President Pierce, along with two older officers, to 



134 ^ TRIBUTE TO MCCLELLAN. 

observe the operations of the contending forces in 
the Crimea ; and I was also aware that he had made 
a report which evinced how well he had studied 
the art of war in the camps of those European ar- 
mies, and how much he had profited in his profes- 
sion by that opportunity. Of course I observed, 
on the breaking out of our civil war, how he was 
distinguishing himself in the West, and what effi- 
cient service he was rendering to the cause of the 
Union, before he was called to Washington to take 
a high command ; how he organized the Army of 
the Potomac in the winter of 1861-62 ; how he led 
it into Virginia upon a plan of campaign conceived 
with the most admirable design, and wanting no 
element of success save the steady co-operation and 
loyal support of the Government that he left be- 
hind him in Washington, that had sent him into the 
field at the head of an army for which the country 
was indebted mainly to him, and to which that 
Government owed a faithful support of its com- 
mander. I knew, as others knew, and lamented as 
others did, how his plans had been more than once 
frustrated by those who suffered a weak jealousy of 
his rising reputation and popularity to obscure 
their perceptions of his great importance to the 
Union which he was so faithfully serving and his 
importance to themselves ; how he became an ob- 
ject of distrust and dislike to one portion of the 



A TRIBUTE TO MCCLELLAN. 135 

people and their rulers, because of a fear that he 
would become too dear to the majority of the na- 
tion. I saw, as every one saw, how the Army of 
the Potomac was put into the greatest peril by suc- 
cessive blunders of the Administration ; how the 
President was obliged to rely on McClellan to save 
it from annihilation ; how he rescued it by the 
bloody march to the James, without any loss of its 
honor or its prestige ; how he was then refused the 
re-enforcements which would have enabled him to 
advance on Richmond ; how he was ordered to 
withdraw his army toward Washington ; how he 
was separated from that army and relegated to in- 
activity; how he was not allowed to lead even a 
regiment when General Pope was about to be 
driven in upon Washington. And then, when the 
capital was in imminent peril, I knew, as every one 
knew, that McClellan was called upon to save it, 
and how nobly he responded to the call. Finally, I 
saw, as every one saw. South Mountain and Antie- 
tam, the liberation of Maryland, the last advance of 
McClellan into Virginia, the near probability of his 
crushing the forces of the Confederates in detail, 
his sudden and unexplained removal from the com- 
mand, and the attempt to disgrace him in the eyes 
of his countrymen by directing him to report for 
orders at a place remote from the scene of war and 
from the seat of the Government. All this strange 



136 A TRIBUTE TO MCCLELLAN. 

course of events I followed with the deepest inter- 
est and the clearest conviction that the Govern- 
ment was only prolonging the war and rendering 
necessary a then immeasurable expenditure of blood 
and treasure. 

General McClellan was sent into a forced re- 
tirement in November, 1862. I had shortly before 
removed to the city of New York ; and when in 
the course of that winter McClellan came to that 
city and occupied a house which his friends pre- 
sented to him, busying himself, with the aid of his 
staff, in preparing his report of his campaigns, I re- 
newed my acquaintance with him. I was anxious to 
see the man who had risen to such high distinction 
at so early an age, who was so differently regarded 
by the two political parties, and who had been 
made the most conspicuous instance, certainly in 
our own history or indeed in any modern history, 
of a general separated from the service of his 
country when it was engaged in a great war for 
the preservation of its national existence, when it 
needed all his accomplishments and influence and 
powers, and when it could not have them because 
he might become an object of too much public 
admiration ! Whatever other men might think, 
my own conviction was clear that as a citizen of 
the United States, deeply concerned for the preser- 
vation of the Union and the Constitution, I had 



A TRIBUTE TO MCCLELLAN, 137 

been wronged, as all other Union men had been 
wronged, by the taking of General McClellan from 
the public service. From the time of my first visit 
to him to the day of his lamented death we have 
been near friends. 

Three-and-twenty years of close intimacy and 
of constant observation of the man have given me 
a right to speak of him to others. But I specially 
desire to speak to the younger generations of the 
repubhc. I shall speak of him in words that will 
be measured, but they will not be stinted by any 
fear of criticism. 

I beHeve that I understood his feehngs, his 
principles, his unfailing sense of duty, his habitual 
and unswerving fidelity to every obligation, his 
rare charity toward others, his tenderness and 
his manliness. In every relation of life, to his fam- 
ily and friends, to his fellow-men and to his God, 
he was ever the same person, in whom the one 
predominant trait was the completeness of his 
moral and intellectual nature and the strength and 
beauty of his character. The basis of his moral 
character was a firm religious faith. The basis 
of his intellectual character was a comprehensive 
power to understand any question, subject or occa- 
sion on which he had to act. As a soldier he 
should be rated very high. As a statesman I have 
always rated him equally high. I have not known 



138 A TRIBUTE TO MCCLELLAN. 

any man not specially trained in the philosophy of 
politics whose views of public and constitutional 
questions were so sound and wise as his. His 
reading was never confined to his profession, and 
it was far ampler and more various than the world 
knew of. He had traveled much, and his knowl- 
edge of mankind was wide and accurate. But, 
highly as I have always estimated his intellectual 
powers, his accomplishments and acquirements, I 
dwell with peculiar fondness and pride upon the 
almost absolute perfection of his personal charac- 
ter, for it came as near to perfection as was possi- 
ble for human nature. He has gone to his grave — 
a too early grave — with no shadow resting upon 
his name. No unworthy act or word, no occur- 
rence in his whole life for which those who loved 
him need blush, rises up to alloy our grief and to 
add to it a bitter pang. There is nothing to be ex- 
tenuated or excused. It is for this that his fame 
stands and will stand conspicuous — shall I not say 
unrivaled? It was for this that vast crowds fol- 
lowed his bier with such touching reverence when 
his remains were borne in grand and solemn sim- 
plicity to their last resting place, which overlooks 
the Delaware at the capital of his adopted State. 

Undoubtedly it was his strong rehgious nature 
that gave such completeness to his moral charac- 
ter, and preserved him unspotted from the world, 



A TRIBUTE TO MCCLELLAN, 139 

although he lived constantly in the world of so- 
ciety, of affairs, and of many and various inter- 
ests. I speak of nothing that may not noAV be told 
vrhen I relate that in his- household every morning 
of his life began and every evening of his life ended 
with a simple religious service, at which any guest 
who was with him was always present ; and who 
that ever heard the sweet confiding tones of his 
voice in those unaffected petitions and thanks to 
his Maker can ever forget them ? 

It is not, in my judgment, premature to forecast 
the estimation in which he will be finally held in 
history. There are some things in regard to his 
career as a general that are incontrovertible. That 
success which the contemporary public thought 
the only proof of greatness, which was not always 
his, but the want of which can detract nothing from 
his true renown, will not be the measure that those 
who are to come after us will apply to him. They 
w411 seek to know where rests the responsibility for 
his not ending our civil war when and as he hoped 
to end it. Their scrutiny must necessarily be turned 
upon the conduct of those who were his official 
superiors. They will be uninfluenced by the popu- 
lar clamor of the day for immediate victories ; a 
clamor that was without any comprehension of the 
means by which victories have to be won. They 
will have to read of a general sent into the field at 



140 A TRIBUTE TO MCCLELLAN. 

the head of the finest army the United States ever 
had, which he had created out of raw and unorgan- 
ized levies, had disciplined into the utmost effi- 
ciency, and taught to obey and second him as 
troops have rarely obeyed and seconded a leader. 
They will have to read of a government remaining at 
the seat of authority, composed of mere civilians, and 
without a single mihtary adviser whose judgment 
was of high value. They will have to learn of this 
general that he had for many months studied the 
details of the campaign which he was to undertake, 
and made all his plans with admirable forecast ; that 
his success depended, as under such circumstances 
success must always depend, upon the prompt co- 
operation of the government at home in all that a 
general has undertaken, and upon its wise absten- 
tion from all unnecessary interference. They will 
give due heed to the difficulties and responsibilities 
which surrounded and rested upon the head of that 
government ; but, after all has been weighed and 
sifted, there will remain the question whether this 
general was sustained as he should have been. In 
answering this question posterity will note that 
it is utterly immaterial whether re-enforcements 
that were withheld, or combinations that were 
not allowed to be made, were expressly prom- 
ised. If they were not supplied and permitted 
when they could have been, whether promised or 



A TRIBUTE TO MCCLELLAN. 141 

not, there was a failure in the first duty of a gov- 
ernment. 

It may be said that the war was new ; that the 
Administration had much to learn ; that the whole 
North was impatient ; that Washington was always 
in danger, or was assumed to be. But there were 
some things that were not new. It was not new 
that a general in the field, on a campaign which he 
has mastered, so far as future movements in war 
can ever be mastered, knows what is essential to 
success far better than a government of civilians 
can know it. This lesson could have been read on 
many a page of history. 

Not to look beyond our own national annals, 
this lesson had been taught to our fathers and to 
us in the case of the man who achieved our liber- 
ties in the War of the Revolution. There was a 
time when the Continental Congress learned, from 
sad experience, that if Washington were not left 
untrammeled by cabals, were not supported with all 
the resources that the country could furnish, and 
made free to act upon his own judgment, the cause 
of our Independence would be lost. Our Consti- 
tution, for many excellent reasons, makes the Presi- 
dent commander-in-chief of the armies and navies 
of the United States. He may, therefore, lawfully 
direct the movements of armies and of fleets ; and 
when he directs he must be, and always is, obeyed. 



142 



A TRIBUTE TO MCCLELLAN. 



But are we never to learn that war is an art which, 
of all others, requires not only special aptitude, 
but special training ? While no Executive is ever 
to abdicate a single one of his constitutional func- 
tions, there are, and must be, junctures in every 
great war, in which a wise President will exercise 
no interference with military plans which he is not 
personally competent to form, and in which his 
judgment must necessarily be inferior to that of 
the general whom he has selected and trusted to 
conduct a campaign. 

The official relations of President Lincoln with 
General McClellan, through the whole period of 
the latter's military service after he was called to 
Washington and invested with a high command, 
are filled with illustrations of the folly of overrul- 
ing plans which a general has formed, of dictating 
his movements, and of refusing or omitting to sup- 
ply him with resources which could have been 
furnished. To contend that McClellan, with what 
the Administration chose to give him, and under 
the conditions which they imposed upon him, al- 
though the latter may have been contrary to his 
judgment, and the former unequal to his requisi- 
tions, ought to have succeeded, and must be pro- 
nounced wanting in the characteristics and abilities 
of a great general because he did not accomplish 
all that he undertook, is to reverse the only sensible 



A TRIBUTE TO MCCLELLAN. 143 

process of judging between him and his official 
superiors. 

It is not so that he will be estimated in the 
future ; nor is it so that he is even now likely to be 
estimated by the generation which is already on 
the stage of life, and which forms the connecting 
link between those who lived through our civil 
war and a distant posterity. There are already 
growm men and women who were infants or were 
unborn during that terrible struggle, who seek for 
correct knowledge respecting its incidents and its 
actors, who are not the slaves of prejudice, who 
will learn the truth, and will transmit it to the 
generations that are to come. To them, and to 
those who are to succeed them, McClellan will be 
an object of great interest, not only because of 
his character, but because of the injustice that was 
done him by his immediate contemporaries ; for 
there is nothing that a generous and just posterity 
is more prone or more solicitous to do than it is 
to reverse an unmerited verdict in every case in 
which contemporary judgment has been wrong. 
It may, therefore, be confidently predicted that 
those w^ho are hereafter to review this portion of 
our history will say of the Federal Administration 
of i86i-'62 that, placed as they were, they should 
have disregarded popular clamor, and should have 
prevented its unreasonable demands from exacting 



144 



A TRIBUTE TO M<^CLELLAN. 



of a general things that he could not perform if he 
were not properly seconded and supphed. Leav- 
ing out of the account all personal jealousies, as the 
root of the whole hostility to McClellan on the part 
of many of the official persons whom he left behind 
him in Washington, there are two patent facts in 
regard to his Virginia campaign which stand out 
in glaring colors. 

The first thing that McClellan had to do when 
he landed upon the Peninsula was to take York- 
town and to free the York River from the Confed- 
erate batteries. To this end it was essential that 
McDowell's corps, the Fifth Army corps, should 
move on the north bank of the river while McClel- 
lan was moving upon Yorktown on the south bank. 
This plan, which was so absolutely indispensable 
that the merest tyro ought to have comprehended 
it, was fully settled before McClellan left Washing- 
ton. He has himself said that he was promised the 
co-operation of McDowell's corps. But the prom- 
ise added nothing to its necessity. After all the 
troops that McClellan was allowed to take with 
him had been landed on the Peninsula, McDowell's 
corps was detached by the Government and was 
marched to a position where it could do no good, 
and where it remained for some time inactive. 
This rendered it necessary for McClellan to remain 
a whole month on the Peninsula, and to invest 



A TRIBUTE TO MCCLELLAN. 145 

Yorktowii by a regular siege, which resulted in his 
driving the Confederates out of that important 
position. If he had had McDowell's co-operation, 
according to the original plan, Yorktown would 
have been turned, and the Confederate troops 
which held it, instead of escaping across the Isth- 
mus, would have been captured. Here, then, Mc- 
Clellan was frustrated in the very first step he had 
contemplated when the Peninsula campaign be- 
gan — frustrated by the act of his own Govern- 
ment. 

Again, when McClellan was encamped on the 
Chickahominy, preparing to advance upon Rich- 
mond, and with every right to expect that McDow- 
ell's corps, then pushed forward to within a few 
miles of McClellan's outposts, would be placed un- 
der his control, orders came suddenly from Wash- 
ington to McDowell that he was not to effect the 
junction with McClellan. McClellan was immedi- 
ately attacked by the Confederates, who, as he has 
always asserted, were in greatly superior force. 
Without McDowell, McClellan could not make an 
aggressive advance, and when attacked he could 
do nothing but rescue his army by the flank move- 
ment to the James, through the bloody conflicts of 
the seven days. There is nowhere recorded in the 
military history of any government more fatal blun- 
ders than these two, which were committed by the 



146 A TRIBUTE TO MCCLELLAN. 

Federal Administration in the spring and summer 
of 1862. 

General McClellan once said to me that Mr. 
Lincoln was a man of a tender nature, to whom it 
was very painful to witness suffering, but that he 
had little vigor of imagination and could not de- 
pict to himself suffering that he did not see. Mr. 
Lincoln's idea of an important battle, the general 
said, was apt to be measured by the number of 
men killed and wounded. Suffering in great mass- 
es, which he could not see, he did not feel as he did 
the comparatively few cases which came under his 
observation when he visited a hospital, where his 
sympathetic kindness to the sick and wounded was 
often very touching. It is easy, therefore, to un- 
derstand at least one reason why Mr. Lincoln did 
not appreciate that quality in a commander which 
seeks to accomplish important strategic results 
with the least expense of life. It is true — too sadly 
true — that successful warfare renders necessary 
great destruction of human life. But that people, 
or their rulers, who make light of the intellectual 
and moral quality in a general which leads him to 
shape his strategy so as to accomplish important 
ends with the least sacrifice of precious lives, com- 
mit a great mistake which history must correct if 
it can over the almost countless graves that are 
scattered through the land. 



A TRIBUTE TO MCCLELLAX. 



[47 



It is singular, but it is probably true, that one 
reason why many persons extend so little sym- 
pathy to any vindication of General McClellan's 
reputation is the unavowed, perhaps unconscious, 
feeling that the reputation of some other general 
will be lessened, or that a comparison shows that 
some other general was his superior. But such 
persons should remember that there is no com- 
parison needful ; that there is no parallel to be 
drawn between General McClellan and any one 
else; that all contrast between McClellan and 
Grant, or between McClellan and any other com- 
mander in our late civil war, is entirely out of 
place, because of a great difference of situation, 
because McClellan was not, while subsequent com- 
manders were, cordially sustained by the Govern- 
ment, and because in their cases there was no 
such political and personal hostihty as there was 
in his. 

It is not, in my judgment, difficult to sum up 
General McClellan's true place in history. It will 
be said of him, I think, finally, that he made it pos- 
sible for the cause of the Union to triumph in the 
end. If he had not made the Army of the Poto- 
mac what it was and what it continued to be — and 
no other man could at that time have organized 
that army as he organized it — if his whole conduct, 
from first to last, military and political, his example 



148 A TRIBUTE TO MCCLELLAN. 

and his precepts, had not been what they were, the 
Union could not have been saved and the Constitu- 
tion would have been lost. Surely this detracts 
nothing from the merits of any subsequent com- 
mander. It asserts nothing that every one should 
not cheerfully concede, who remembers that Mc- 
Clellan not only rendered great military services, 
but that he gave the key-note which rallied and 
kept to the cause of the Union the Democratic 
support without which the Southern States must 
have obtained their separate nationality. '' If se- 
cession is successful," he wrote to President Lin- 
coln, " other dissolutions are clearly to be seen in 
the future. Let neither military disaster, polit- 
ical faction, nor foreign war, shake your settled 
purpose to enforce the equal operation of the 
laws of the United States upon the people of every 
State." 

I do not see how any one can read his letter to 
President Lincoln, now or hereafter, without being 
impressed by the intellectual grasp of the whole 
situation of the Union cause at the time when it 
was written, which is exhibited in its weighty 
paragraphs. Whether the comprehensive policy 
so clearly conceived and so forcibly stated was in 
all respects the true one is not now and will not 
hereafter be the question. Men will differ about 
the comparative merits of the course recommend- 



A TRIBUTE TO MCCLELLAN. 149 

ed by General McClellan and that pursued by the 
Administration. But there should be no difference 
of opinion, between persons of judgment, about 
the statesmanlike power which this letter evinces. 
When it first saw the light it was almost wholly 
lost upon the contemporary public, because of the 
miserable habit of imputing to every conspic- 
uous and important man some selfish object in 
all that he does. I remember in the newspaper 
press of that period, after this letter became pub- 
lic, but one serious discussion of the important 
policy which it suggested, and this was in a jour- 
nal conducted by a gentleman who was an in- 
timate friend of General McClellan. The news- 
paper press of both political parties seemed, for 
the most part, to take it for granted that the letter 
was designed as a political '' campaign document," 
without any reference to the circumstances under 
which it was written, or to the time when it be- 
came public. 

At the close of some papers on General Mc- 
Clellan's services to the Union, which I published 
in the " North American Review " five years ago, 
I expressed the hope that his personal memoirs 
would soon be given to the world. It is known 
that he had been for several years engaged upon 
this important work, but it is not yet ascertained 
in what state he left any part of it. It is un- 



I50 A TRIBUTE TO MCCLELLAN. 

derstood, however, that everything now passes 
into the hands of his accomplished and life-long 
friend, Mr. William C. Prime.* 

Washington., D. C, November 14, iSSj. 



* Any one who desires to understand what made McClellan so suc- 
cessful in organizing the Army of the Potomac, and how fortunate it 
was that that great work was intrusted to him, should examine the 
volume published by Lippincott & Co., at Philadelphia, in October, 
1 861, under the title of " The Armies of Europe." McClellan's official 
report of his observations in Europe was originally printed as a Gov- 
ernment document, in an inconvenient quarto foiin. It remained but 
little known, excepting to military men, until it was brought out in the 
Philadelphia edition, after he was called to Washington and invested 
with a high command. It then appeared how immense and minute 
was his knowledge of the whole art of war in all its multifarious de- 
tails. A reader who shall examine this work at the present day will 
appreciate what the Government and people of the United States lost 
when this officer was put into a condition in which the Union could 
no longer have his military services. 



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